I’d been sober for quite a while when I arrived in Marrakech. This wouldn’t be of much significance, considering Morocco is a predominantly Muslim country, and therefore quite dry, except that I was to spend the next seven days and six nights in a luxury villa with 11 strangers (I’d brought a friend along, making us 13 in total), six staff members, eight bedrooms, zero responsibilities, 80 bucks worth of medina hash and more wine bottles per person than water.

If this sounds like the setup for a duplicative reality series, it certainly felt that way. In fact, the 13 of us (ranging in age from 25 to 45) had traveled to this paradisiacal, 24,000-square-foot estate in The Palmeraie, the so-called Beverly Hills of Northern Africa. We were here for the third iteration of a pop-up hospitality project called A Moveable Feast, which provides affluent young people with a first-class take on the hostel experience of meeting strangers abroad in far-flung locales—sans bedbugs, but maybe avec bedfellows.

The brainchild of John Munson—a former New York City party promoter, hotel honcho and graduate of INSEAD, the elite European “Business School for the World”—our week in Marrakech was meant to serve as a proof of concept for his vision of throwing lavish parties for profit. The first Moveable Feast had been hosted for free at a friend’s family cabin in the Italian Alps in Livigno; the second in Aquitaine, France.

John, 36, a self-proclaimed “gadabout” who cost himself a job at American Express when an old screen grab of his years-earlier Jeopardy appearance surfaced (pinky-ringed John, wearing a sport coat and ascot, had drawn a penis around his name on the podium display screen), resides in his normal life in a 400-square-foot apartment in New York City. A Moveable Feast is his take on business as pleasure.

“This entire business is super selfish of me,” John says. “I just want to hang out in sweet mansions with different people, and this is how I can do it.”

Honestly, same. From the moment I heard about AMF Marrakech, I knew I wanted to be there, for whatever it was going to be. John agreed within minutes of our introduction to host me free of charge–this publication, he said, “has been a favorite of mine forever”–while regular guests paid $3,000 per person, not including airfare, for a double-occupancy room and unlimited food and drink, plus a week’s worth of surprise excursions. Then came an email I wasn’t expecting: “Since we’re all about maximizing the number of fun people there … if you have a plus-one you’d like to room with, you can invite them along as well. My only caveat is that they be awesome,” John had written. An all-expenses-paid week-long luxury vacation in one of my bucket-list destinations, and I get to bring a friend? Avec plaisir.

Only weeks earlier, my friend Katie had been telling me that she wanted to travel but didn’t know where or with whom, just that she wanted to have some capital-F Fun. Burnt out on work, she was desperate for a mental and literal vacation. “How about Morocco?” I texted her.

Morocco is an Islamic country of 35.7 million people, situatuated at the northwestern edge of Africa, ruled by a series of dynasties since the foundation of the first Moroccan state in 788 AD. It is seperated from Spain by the Strait of Gibraltar, and thus enjoys a fairily European influence—most everyone there speaks French, along with the standard Arabic. It is, for reasons of religion, mostly dry of alcohol—though in 2019, in the Vegas-like clubs of its more modern cities, you can get Grey Goose and Jose Cuervo bottle service, and all of the standard juices and sodas, and forget all of this quite easily.

Friends I spoke with in the days leading up to this trip asked me not to talk about it, so envious were they of my admittedly plum assignment. I promised them slippers and spices, and agreed to shut up. So it was with much muted preparatory anticipation, and luggage packed sparingly to save room for souvenirs, that we arrived at Marrakech Menara Airport on a misty Monday evening. We were greeted beyond baggage claim by our happy host, clad in a crinkly maroon linen suit and with a burgundy fez hat perched jauntily atop his head, its black fringe tassel flitting to-and-fro on the bumpy 20-minute ride to the guard-gated Villa Ksarna.

Katie and I were among the final few guests to arrive at the villa. Immediately, we were offered glasses of champagne. I opted instead for sparkling water. Then we were shown downstairs, along a crimson corridor, to our basement-level room, also crimson, dimly lit and with bedding on each of our twin beds in various shades of cardinal. Outside the door hung a large magnified photo of an abstracted black-ink tattoo carved into an unidentifiable inch of fair and hairy flesh. In my head, I began to call our room “our womb.” Across from it was a mint green mirror-walled gymnasium, with a ballet barre and dated exercise apparatuses, a baby’s crib filled with plush toys and the blue papier-mâché torso of a pregnant woman, limbs splayed as if in ecstasy or pain.

After quickly showering and dressing in fresh clothes, Katie and I joined the rest of the group upstairs in the lounge (full wet bar, upright piano, wood-burning fireplace, two original Warhol Marilyns, three sofas covered with two dozen throw pillows, a vase of long stem red roses) for drinks: more sparkling water, plus red wine and champagne. Then we loaded into a white Mercedes 16-passenger Sprinter, with neon-strip atmosphere lights along the interior roof, and headed into the Medina, the city’s ancient walled labyrinthine complex of shops, restaurants and mosques. We passed fruit-juice stalls, roasting sheep’s heads and mountains of golden fried fish, before walking through an unassuming stone door into the breathtaking Palais Gharnata for our first meal.

Originally built in the 16th century as the primary residence of a local vizier, the palace has since been transformed into a hidden-in-plain sight restaurant. It serves regional cuisine in an authentic Moroccan setting, its walls covered in dizzying multicolor mosaics in accordance with the canons of Arabic geometry. We started with traditional Moroccan salads: sugar-sweet pureed squash sprinkled with sesame seeds, oily strips of multi-colored bell pepper, creamy mashed eggplant, a coarse olive tapenade, bright cubes of citrusy beetroot. Next came entrees served from two steaming terra-cotta tagines: Kefta Mkaouara, a traditional dish of beef meatballs served with tomato sauce and soft egg; and chicken cooked with green olives and lemon.

Red wine flowed throughout, and for dessert there was a traditional dish called Ktefa, which is layers of crackly warqa pastry sprinkled with fried almonds and spackled with an orange-flower crème anglaise. As we sipped our first glasses of postprandial Moroccan mint tea, a woman in a skimpy black velvet dress festooned with rhinestone tassels and iridescent wings appeared, performing a belly dance that John rose briefly to join. He then clinked a glass to gather our attention, so that we could each be properly introduced to the group.

There was Paola Zamudio, a New York-based commercial interior designer who had been our flight, and then Allison Van Cleave, a musician and web designer, and her boyfriend, Bennett Brown; Georgetown anesthesiologist George Chaucer Hwang; Alabama-based international businessman Mack Cornwell; Miami-based mortgage broker and salsa dancer Scott Jones; John’s girlfriend, Pam Bristow, the Lisbon-based CEO of a leather goods brand called MARKS; Mike Wilson, co-founder and designer of a rentable cottage retreat just north of Lake Ontario; hotelier Dickie Dickerson (not a pseudonym!), and his girlfriend—she wishes to remain anonymous—whom he met at Burning Man.

Almost every moment of this week-long party had been pre-planned by our host, but the events of each day would not be disclosed until the night before, leaving much mystery throughout. The following day, John told us, would be unscheduled, though he encouraged us all to return to the Medina to familiarize ourselves with its many vendors, their rugs and rings and slippers and spices, and try to get a hang of the sport of haggling. (“Never pay more than 45 percent of what they first quote you,” he cautioned.)

“Statistically, one in five people will get a stomach bug,” he cautioned further. “I’ve taken one for the team already.” We were warned not to drink water from the taps or unsealed bottles.

We slept that night, deep and jetlagged, some waking at dawn to the call to prayer, which happens a total of five times a day across the country, blasted out through air raid-type loudspeakers from mosque to mosque, a symphony of voices in praise: Allahu Akbar, or “God is great”; As-salatu Khayrun Minan-nawm, or “Prayer is better than sleep.”

Breakfast was served from 8 a.m. onward, allowing for early risers and late sleepers alike to sample fresh rolls with jam, eggs cooked to order and served with small dishes of ground cumin, and a large fruit salad with juicy slices of tangerine, avocado, pear and banana. Plus more mint tea, coffee with warmed milk, and fresh squeezed orange juice. All of this was ready and waiting for us each morning when we trickled into the dining room—a jewel box of mosaiced walls, carved ceiling panels and ornate chairs—looking out of place in our modern pajamas and bare feet.

“We’re bringing back robe culture,” said Dickie, wrapped in the white terry cloth robe he’d found in his ensuite bathroom, feet in leopard-print slippers.

I ran downstairs and opened my suitcase, where I’d packed a bundle of one-of-a-kind silk and cotton kimonos on loan from the Venice, California-based designer Ibby Hartley, and wrapped myself in a short indigo-dyed cotton piece with a matching belt.

Katie and I finished our eggs and coffee, then got dressed and rode the Mercedes Sprinter back into the medina, where we picked up a couple of pairs of babouches (traditional leather slippers) and painted brass jewelry bowls, binged on bottles of jasmine and gardenia and vetiver-scented argan oil, and practiced our haggling skills. Perched on a pile of wool pillows outside a rug shop, we took turns biting off chewy globs of orange flower and almond-studded nougat and a honeyed pistachio bar, passing the plastic-wrapped sweets back and forth. Sex is great, but have you ever eaten perfumed candy for lunch with your best friend in a quiet corner of an ancient country?

We returned to the villa around sundown, and changed into more Ibby Hartley pieces—I wore tight vintage Levi’s with a sheer gauzy orange kimono that covered my chest with two strips of black satin, and Katie put on a black kimono with a cyanotype-inspired red poppy print hand-drawn by Hartley herself. Before dinner, we enjoyed light snacks on the patio at a mosaic-encrusted table laden with cheese and crackers, grapes, figs, pastel-hued meringue cookies and metal buckets containing bottles of chilled sparkling water and wine.

“The massage was full-body,” said a blissed-out Chaucer, who had come home from the medina early for a rubdown in the onsite hammam downstairs. “Usually you don’t get …”

“An erection?” offered John. This is classic John. He can’t help but bring his raucous, let’s call it … little-brother enegry to an otherwise civilized moment. (He distributed stainless steel flasks full of red wine for the camel ride we took days later.)

After we finished swapping highlights from the day, we moved into the dining room, which had been reset since breakfast, the table now covered in clusters of fresh fruit, fake flowers and flickering candles. As we took our seats around the table, instructed specifically to sit next to someone new, a male member of the house staff sprinkled drops of rose oil into the palms of our hands, dispensed from an ornate glass-and-metal bottle.

The meal began with a chilled beet soup, flavored with citrus and olive oil, prepared by our on-site private chef. Then more steaming tagines were brought out, this time containing some of the most delicious beef I’ve eaten in my entire life, slow braised with apricots and plums, fork-tender and melting off the bone, as well as yet more of the chicken and green olive dish, tonight garnished with pinwheels of fried potato strings. I had to steel myself from reaching for more of the beef—in part for fear of greasing up the sleeves of my borrowed kimono, and also because I didn’t want just another bite but a vat at my bedside. Dessert was two identical platters of a rich silken flan, which I again sat silently eying after finishing my own plate first.

At the end of the meal, with everyone but me drunk on red wine, we played a nameless game of accelerated intimacy: Each of us posed a question to the group, which we answered anonymously on scraps of paper dropped into a fez, then the question-asker read the answers aloud.

John began by asking us each to share one secret:

My penis bends to the left.

I was a teenage lip gloss model.

I shoplift something every day.

Mike asked us to share our favorite sexual position:

On top in the bath.

By myself, in front of my three-panel vanity.

Fuck sex! Too busy pondering my investment positions.

Dickie asked what we would title our autobiography:

Manifestations of Humble Grandeur.

Champagne, Charletons and Chauvinists.

Eat, Win and Fuck.

And on and on.

It was by now late in the evening on November 6, the day of the much-anticipated 2018 midterm elections back in the United States. It was the most important day in American politics since November 8, 2016, and most of us had scrambled to vote early, in advance of the trip––it would have been hard to travel here in good conscious otherwise.

“Let’s check on the vote,” I suggested. Surely there would be some early exit polls reporting from the East Coast.

“Let’s not and wait till tomorrow,” said Pam and John in unison.

But first, we all put on bathing suits and headed out to the pool for a midnight swim. The large pool was slow to warm, and in spots toward the deeper end, it was freezing. I shivered in waist-deep water for posterity before slinking back out and into my robe, and then inside to the lounge where, ever the Canadian, Mike had built a roaring fire. A member of the staff brought out a tray of hot mint tea.

Some of us refreshed various news apps for early results. It was surreal, the dissonance of being thousands of miles from home, ensconced in an experience tailored for maximum pleasure and minimal worry—yet worried, and lost in our phones; talking about politics, the president, rich white men and a two-party system that some of us feel has devovled into a red-and-blue, cause-less color war.

On Instagram, my feed was full of friends posting messages to go out and vote, selfies with “I VOTED” stickers on foreheads, performative activism. My story from that day showed Katie and me faffing about the gym in our kimonos, our decadent meal, the gorgeous villa, Mack nibbling on the thornless stem of a red rose in a terry robe and knockoff Louis Vuitton babouches.

“I feel very gauche, but I’m going to take a sip of champagne,” said Mack, midway through a conversation about liberals lacking a set of values as clear or compelling as the conservative agenda. He tipped the bottle into his mouth.

Our itinerary was curated around maximum fun, but with little cultural awareness. Wednesday was spent at Terre des Étoiles, a luxury-glamping eco lodge in the Agafay Desert, where we rode camels through pebbly hills at sunset, then ate a three-course dinner in a heated tent through which costumed African performers danced in and out. A couple of days lived like this is a treat anywhere. But as the trip went on, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the obvious: We were a group of (mostly) wealthy, (mostly) white young people pursuing a very specific experience in a very complicated North African country.

“High society, low sobriety was a lifestyle I always hoped would catch on, but it never quite did,” said John, who spent the week making sure nobody’s wine glass was ever empty, no matter the hour, and had chosen restaurants that occupied the Venn center of authentic cuisine and alcoholic beverage service. “It’s my mission to spread that. … I just want to bring back fun.”

On Thursday we rode the Mercedes Sprinter two and a half hours to the seaside town of Essaouira, stopping briefly to gather around an Argania tree full of goats, one of many ultimate Moroccan photo ops. In the summer months, these goats climb the trees to chew on Argan fruit, pooping out the nuts that are then collected and ground down for the oil that Katie and I bought in the medina. But in November, these goats are placed in the fruitless trees by local farmers looking to shake a few Dhiram coins out of people like us, there for an off-season selfie. One of them took our photo as a group, and then demanded money from Mike before he’d return his camera.

In town, Katie and I wandered around the souk, which was full of sterling silver jewelry merchants, and mountains and mountains of colorful Berber rugs. We ate lunch at a picnic table along the water, where freshly caught seafood was hauled up in nets, sold raw and cooked in minutes, served with hot french fries and a salad of sliced bell pepper and red onion. We ate uni, squid, local sardines and dorado—all of this for the equivalent of $30 in total.

On the ride back home to the villa, five of the 13 of us worked on laptops tethered to roaming mobile phones, sending business emails and closing deals.

As instructed by our host, we dressed for dinner that night in all white and ate on the patio. The menu: broiled tomatoes, sautéed green beans and twinned dishes of a meaty white fish baked en croute. Dessert was a giant bowl filled with pre-scooped balls of ice cream: vanilla, chocolate, coffee and lemon sorbet. Inspired by the necklace he’d noticed around my neck on the first day (a gold replica 5-mg Valium charm from my Grandma Winnie), John had us go around the table and share about our families—which is actually an insane ask of a group of strangers who’ve been drinking all day! Laughter, tears, divorce and a direct descendent of George Washington! Talk about trauma bonding.

One of the sweetest moments of the trip was not on anyone’s itinerary, was not suggested by John, was in fact not planned at all. After the fish dinner, our group gathered for more beverages in the lounge, as we’d come to do each night, slipping off to bed in ones and twos as morning crept closer. Katie and Chaucer had been taking turns on a guitar that John had picked up at a local pawn shop, and Allison had performed an improvised rap about the events of our trip so far (think day-of-the-week undies put to lyrics). We were punchy and having a good time. Nothing was planned for the next day, Friday; we were well into our final few days together; and there was no reason to go to bed. One of us proposed staying up till the dawn to hear the call to prayer—to pull an all-nighter, Morocco-style. It was by this point about two in the morning, and staying up another couple of hours didn’t seem so hard.

But by five o’clock, only Allison, Katie and I remained. We dragged a pile of blankets outside and spread them out on the lawn, beneath tall shadowy palm trees and thick bushes of fragrant night-blooming jasmine. Fat black olives from the surrounding groves dotted the grass, squishy and wet. The first day I’d explored the grounds, finding the trampoline and the clay tennis court with wire fences covered in drooping pink flowers, I thought someone had dropped a tray of food and left the mess, then looked up to see row after row of fruit-bearing olive trees. So we spread out the blankets and added a few extra sheets to snuggle under, and lay there, Katie to my right and Allison on my left, in this yard that felt more like a private park, waiting in silence for the sounds of the day’s first prayers.

What followed was the kind of magic moment you couldn’t account for nor recreate. More special than dinner at Palais Jad Mahal the next night—our night in the “Beverly Hills of Marrakech”—or bottle service at Club Epicurien at the Casino de Marrakech after that. More special than all the sunny, crystal-clear Marrakech days and cloudless nights, with their glittering starry skies—the kind of stars made to be kissed under. The three of us nearly gave up waiting to hear the prayer, dozing off and on, spooned together, hip to hip to hip. And when it finally came, it was so forceful and so beautiful, so unlike anything we hear at home, so much a part of this place where we were guests without a docent. And there was something, too, about the safe platonic intimacy shared between the three of us, near-sleeping beside one another, the three youngest girls in the house here waiting to share the oldest tradition in the land.

In that moment I felt deeply grateful to be sober, and to be experiencing this entire trip in sobriety, awake–literally and figuratively–for the small and quiet moments, the details, the curve of a carved chair and the bright cherry red color of a wool rug, which perhaps under the glaze and blur of alcohol I might not have noticed, or would have appreciated less. I was grateful for the proof that, even in an experience curated around being drunk and well-fed, I was able to attain maximum pleasure without altering my chemical state. If a party is a good enough time without booze, it’s a good party.

We’d slept late into Friday, after staying up so long, not waking till just after three in the afternoon. Still needing souvenirs for a few friends back home, Katie and I went again into the Medina, where this time we got lost snaking our way out and, looking up only a second to notice a fingernail moon low in the lavender sky, Katie’s iPhone was swiped from her jean jacket pocket, gone just like that. Then the next night, Saturday, we dressed in costumes purchased from the Medina with the 400 dirham ($40) stipend John had given to each of us, and gathered at a flower-petal strewn table in the center of the house for the farewell feast: a whole roast lamb carved by the property manager.

By the end of the meal more than one of us was retching in the toilet, and Chaucer, the doctor, was handing out Cipro and French-Arabic antidiarrheal pills like after-dinner mints. By this point in the week, I’d downed such a disproportionate number of water bottles myself, drinking exactly none of my case of wine, that we’d run out of bottled water and had to swallow our meds with gulps from half-empties scattered around the villa. Yes, we’d run out of water before we ran out of wine. Sixteen bottles remained unopened on the final morning, a mix of Moroccan reds and whites.

By the time Katie and I arrived at the Four Seasons hotel in Casablanca on Sunday afternoon—we had a day layover here before heading back home to Los Angeles—we were more than ready for a vacation from our vacation.

We gave our bags to the concierge and, before even checking in, filled many small plates with tiny, beautiful confections set up in the lobby lounge: skewers of pink marshmallows and pineapple cubes passed through a molten chocolate fountain, smoked salmon and cream cheese rillettes, shot glasses filled with a fuschia beet hummus and sticks of carrot and celery, a single bite-sized cheesecake glossy beneath a raspberry glaze. Then we went upstairs, took turns in the deep bathtub and put on yet more plush terry robes. Our wet hair wrapped in towels, we applied Sahara-sourced prickly pear-oil sheet masks from a Korean brand called Huxley, plopped into our adjacent full-twin beds and turned on the TV, where Wild had just begun to play on the movie channel.

I swear to God, we both screamed when we saw Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed toss her too-tight, red-laced hiking boot off a cliff along the Pacific Crest Trail in the movie’s opening scene. It was exactly what we didn’t know, until just that moment, we absolutely needed to see. Strayed’s story is the hero’s journey, memorable for its moment of simple pleasure: a new pair of big-enough hiking boots, a sip of cold Snapple lemonade, cold mush finally cooked hot thanks to the proper propane tank. But on this trip we hadn’t been heroic at all. We’d visited ancient places and not bothered to learn their history. We’d eaten lunch dessert daily and kept the staff up for midnight tea service every night. It had been all high and no low, and aren’t the highs meaningless if you don’t also know the lows? Shouldn’t you have to work for it, even just a little? Lost in Cheryl’s story—which is full of pain and grief and longing—it was a relief to feel something other than feckless and full.

The next day, before leaving for the airport, both of us still queasy from that poison roast lamb, Katie and I took a cab to the Hassan II Mosque and joined the English-speaking tour. It is the largest mosque in all of Africa, and the fifth largest in the whole world, with the world’s tallest minaret, at 210 meters. We learned that egg yolk and black soap are mixed into the plaster covering the basement-level hammam to make it water resistant, and that on clear and warm days of prayer, the entire roof of the mosque opens back like a sunroof. It rained the whole time.