![]() Sundays work best, thanks to football, which is made to be stared at with a fitting blankness, and the occasional yelp, should our local teams be going down to ignominious defeat. But where No Toro is heavily skewed toward breakfast, Belly Bombz leans toward dinner eat this food for lunch, and you’ll probably spend the afternoon on the couch in the man cave, staring blankly at whatever sport is on at the moment. The two restaurants overlap only at lunch and only on weekends. This is a restaurant of Belly Bombz that will make your belly very happy to have been bombed.īelly Bombz sits in an Artesia mini-mall, a short distance north of Little India, next to the equally wonderful No Toro Café. In an age of restaurant names that simply ooze healthy, organic, natural, farm-to-table, warm and cozy, Belly Bombz is unapologetically what it claims to be: a casual café that serves dishes that hit you in the gut and stay there until your body figures out what the heck is going on.Īnd while you deal with the shock of what you’ve consumed, you can enjoy a tasty craft beer, and muck about on your plate for one more morsel. And we, their pale confessors.Belly Bombz is pretty much perfectly named. The rocks of Dades outside, stacked and shorn. Their Berber letter yaz, signifying freedom, its shape like a man with his arms up. They, with their history, their poverty, their dry cold wind. “The women here,” he said, “suffer too much.” He had even tried to trick them by saying it was candy. Why did they tell us all this? The bus driver said he had tried to pass out birth control pills, but the women would not take them. But he wrote in my journal, You are mazing. Did not want the bloody sheet hung like a flag out the window. He did not want his grandma with her ear to the door on his wedding night. Hassan, the young man, had been to university. Black fabric cloaked them, covering all but a single eye. In the fields grandmothers bent under loads of sticks, hauling them home for cooking fires. With gestures we asked how hers was done, and she held up a safety pin. We had met one young woman at the hammam, tried to speak to her as we paid for our baths, found no common language but our tattoos-hers on her face, ours on the smalls of our backs. He looked at us as if we were his daughters and said, “The women here suffer more than the men.” He told us the Berber women had too many babies, one every year, no medicine. Others spoke of the Arabs, their long-ago conquerors, bringers of Islam.Ī bus driver came and went. Azul! (Hello.) Mush! (Cat.) He stared, and then switched to English and showed me how to write my name in his ancient, alien alphabet. They hovered, served us tea and soup.Ī young man glared, then addressed us in Berber. They told us this, turning toward us with open faces, welcoming, curious. There was propane there, a heater lit just for us, the paying customers. ![]() But Sadie was sick and collapsed in the bathroom, hit her head on the thick wooden door. There were no other tourists at the hotel. The town was clustered at the base of the rocks. On a walk, on a small path, two had followed us at a distance. But in Boumalne Dades we had been spooked immediately. Strange, to be fending them off when we wanted to stare. We were tired by then, accustomed to avoiding eye contact in the streets, although the men in Morocco-Berbers (Moors, I at some point realized)-were the most beautiful we had seen anywhere. The steep desert ridge, the hairpinned road, the sharp edge.
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