Oh, I enjoyed this! Lovely sense of place, I've wanted to visit Morocco for a while.

I always think it must be rather odd travelling abroad as an American, when everyone has an opinion about your government. As a Brit, I've only ever been obliged to nod intelligently at the mention of an appropriate football team - the one exception was Kosovo, where having people yelling "Tony Blair!" with a big thumbs up as I went by was a bit disconcerting!

This. It always seemed to me that Mrs. Coulter used the Oblation Board primarily as an alternative route to power in a world where women don't seem to have many opportunities to gain political or religious influence. I imagine her contempt for the priests and much of the apparatus of the Magisterium is completely real, and very long-standing.

Yes, this. Will is great and all, but Lyra is the heroine of my heart and I'm disappointed that she defers to Will so often and seems to take on so much more of a supporting role as the series progresses.

Haha, yes - all alcohol, all the time! The "drink a toast to nature" was my favourite: we were walking in the mountains in the early morning, and as we admired the view, one of the guys I was with whipped out a flask of vodka and four miniature drinking horns which he apparently carried around with him at all times in case of a toasting emergency. I think Will was lucky to get away with just one shot!

Glad someone mentioned this. I've lived and travelled a lot in the CIS (although not actually Russia), and the drinking culture is very, very different. I've definitely seen children at least as young as twelve drinking vodka at a family meal, and it's often offered to guests: I have fond memories of wandering around Central Asia and the Caucasus and being offered vodka and fruit brandy and highly suspicious home-brewed substances as a matter of course by complete strangers on the most tenuous of excuses (admiring the beautiful scenery? Let's drink a toast to nature! A car ahead has broken down and blocked the road and we're waiting for a truck to pull it over? Hey look, we have a barrel of home-made wine in the trunk! Stopped to ask for directions? Come in for some home-made apple vodka, it's good for your liver! God, I love that part of the world.). So I don't think Otyets Semyon offering Will vodka is a particular sign of ecclesiastical degeneracy, although Pullman succeeds very well at creating the impression that there is something off about the whole encounter.