Saying Goodbye

There have been a few new and exciting things this last week:

My host family has welcomed in a new student for my last week in Morocco. His name is Jamil, ("jamil" means beautiful in Arabic), and he's originally from Algeria but he has lived for most of his life in the U.S., and he is a university student in France. Luckily he came just in time for a week-long music festival in the Oudayas, (outside of the "Kasbah", only a 3 minute walk from where I live). I was able to make two nights of music this week - a night of Berber music/dancing & last night, Gnawa music.  Here's the link to the festival:
http://www.minculture.gov.ma/fr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=929%3Afestival-international-des-arts-et-de-la-culture-l-ete-des-oudayas-r&catid=34%3Aa-la-une-&Itemid=65&lang=fr

The first night (Berber) was fairly calm, although it was very crowded, but at the Gnawa concert there were many Moroccans dancing and singing along. My host mother and her sister came along with us.

And this week I FINISHED MY WRITTEN FINAL! Alhamdulillah. I'm feeling accomplished after taking my two hour written final. I also gave my final oral presentation at Qalam, and realized there's only so many things you can talk about when you're a beginner in Arabic.

Here's me, my host mother Demja, and her new student Jamil

And here's my host dad Najeeb, in our kitchen

Thank you thank you thank you (shukran BISEF) to Morocco, for being so welcoming, comforting, laid back, and insane all at once.  And thank you to Qalam wa Lawh for providing an incredible place for me to study and learn Arabic.

(Bisef=alot in Darija).

One week left....

The fact that I've still only been to the hammam once is pretty devastating. I'm eager to go again today to get clean!

Meanwhile, we've been doing less and less cultural excursions and more and more studying. Next week I have an oral presentation in Arabic for a final, as well as a 2 hour written final. I'm not worried about the oral presentation, because I feel more comfortable speaking Arabic than I do writing.

At the same time, our group (all 15 of us), are working on a project together that will reflect on some of our cultural/language experiences in Morocco. After meeting twice, we were each assigned an Arabic letter, which would represent a theme or object. I was assigned the letter ك  for كرم, or "karim", which means "generosity", and I will talk about our visit to a local orphanage. I was also assigned a second letter خ, for خبز, or "khobz" which means "bread". Bread is present at every meal. Together, we are putting together a movie with a word for each letter, to talk about our experiences over the past 6 weeks. I will post the YouTube link here when it is finished!

I've posted a map of Rabat below. I live in the Medina, my school is in Souissi, and my friends live in Agdal, the Kasbah, Youssoufia, Temara, and Hay Riad.

The Days of Ramadan & Casablanca/Marrakech

It took a while to get used to the Ramadan schedule, but I think I've got it now.

Before Ramadan: I would get home later, and then we would eat dinner at home anytime between 10pm-12am. Then we would sleep, and in the morning my host mom would make me a glorious breakfast.

During Ramadan:
Because the majority of the students at the school are not fasting, they serve complimentary breakfast to us and we eat lunch there too. On weekends, if you're not fasting, good luck! In Rabat, there is ONE cafe open during the day. My friends and I went there on the first day of Ramadan to scope it out.... the windows are tinted so you can't see who is inside. It's kinda sketchy.

Anyway, I try to eat lightly during the day because every night I come home to "iftar" which means breakfast. This is the breaking of the fast each day. We wait for the call to prayer around 7:45, when the sun sets, and then we eat, and we eat, and we eat. Typical iftar consists of soup, eggs, figs, meat, bread, olives, juice, tea, and sesame cookies. But of course there are many, many other things that show up on the table. My personal favorite was a stuffed Moroccan pizza with vegetables. Yum.

I've had quite a few interesting iftar experiences already, including....

-Volunteering for the Moroccan organization "Volontaires Libres...Pour un Monde Meilleur", where we served the iftar meal to Moroccans. This was a lot like a soup kitchen.

-Iftar at the beach. This was a true example of Moroccan hospitality. Our Moroccan friends cooked us 2 tajines over a fire on the rocky beach, and at 7:45 we heard the call to prayer echo from across the river and around the city. It was AMAZING.

So, we just returned from our weekend trip to Casablanca/Marrakech.
On Saturday we drove down, stopping in Casablanca only to see the Hassan II mosque. It was built 20 years ago, and 25,000 can go to pray inside at once.

After a few hours, we boarded our bus again to travel to Marrakech, arriving in the early afternoon for lunch at the hotel. As we drove around the city, I noticed that about 75% of the people walking around outside were foreigners. Marrakech is completely different from Rabat. It basically functions during the day because of tourists, and most cafes, restaurants, and shops in the market are open. We visited the garden of olive and argan trees, a spice shop, the tombs, a palace, and the market.
Walking around the souk, most shopkeepers would speak to us immediately in English, because most of the business that they get is from tourists.

Oh- and it was hot. I guess it was unseasonably cool when we went, but usually it's over 100 degrees.

Iftar on the beach

Hassan II Mosque

Hassan II Mosque

مدرسةMadrasa! School)

Not really sure why there's an exclamation point there. School is school. Except this school is different.
As I said before, I'm studying at Qalam wa Lawh Center for Arabic Studies.

It's a beautiful school, and it usually stays cool in the heat.  (Except of course in the one classroom that I study in, where the AC is broken). Nonetheless, the school is in a part of Rabat called Suissi and it's sort-of far from where I live (the old Medina) and the beach. Each morning my neighbor drives me and 3 of my friends to school in a "grand taxi"- about a 20 minute ride. When we leave school, usually we split our different ways in "petit taxis" or we walk to a tram stop. If I take the tram home, I have a twenty minute walk through the market after the tram ride. Depending on the day, the market may be extremely busy and I end up just pushing my way through. I never walk at night alone.

As far as I know, at school, the group that I am with are the youngest students here. All of us are either rising seniors in high school or beginning college this fall. All the other students at Qalam are university students or older. I've met people from America, Germany, England, France, Italy, Spain, and Norway.  A lot of them are paying tuition and studying here on their own, for 4 week sessions during the summer. Our teachers are from Rabat.
We can also get a tutor here if we need help. I'm thinking it's time for me to hit that up.

Qalam also organizes excursions for us, usually 2 afternoons each week. Usually they have some sort of cultural significance, but last week we went paintballing.

Tangier & Chefchaouen

Our first stop this past weekend: Chefchaouen.

I fell in love! Everything in Chefchaouen is blue. Our hotel was blue, the houses in the old medina were painted blue, the sky was blue. Our tour guide told us that the people paint their houses blue to stay cool. I also noticed that the people in Chefchaouen were beautiful! (The closer we got to the Mediterranean Sea, the more spanish/mediterranean looking people were). They women also dressed a bit less conservatively.

We only spent one day in Chefchaouen, but that was enough time for us to...
- hike part of a mountain to see a Mosque and get a "picture-perfect" view of the city.
-visit a community center where we met young Moroccan kids and tried our our Arabic speaking skills with them, play chess, and draw.
-spend 5 hours at one restaurant
- explore the souk a bit at night.

Everybody that we met there was happy... they call Chefchaouen the "weed capital of Morocco".

Second stop: Tangier (Tanger)

Despite the fact that half of our group was sick, the majority of us had a great time in Tangier.

The great thing about Tangier is that it's next to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and the beaches were much nicer than those in Rabat. The sand was smoother, they weren't crowded, and it wasn't scorching hot. In the morning we spent a few hours at the beach and at cafes alongside the beach, and in the afternoon we were given a guided tour (from an extremely happy older man wearing a white djellaba). He showed us the kasbah, (the palace of Tangier), the kasbah museum, around the city, and Hercules Cave.

And of course, there were many stray cats roaming the street as usual. I went into a pet store in Tangier, and the cats in the store looked like they were in worse condition than the cats on the street. The stray cats are actually cute! They lounge around in the sun, and nobody bothers them. They live a good life.

Side note: Although I won't be fasting, Ramadan starts this week, and while all the other muslim Moroccans will be up late into the night eating and then sleeping in, I still have school. I'm not really sure how this is gonna work out, because my host parents will be eating when the sun goes down, then at 2 a.m. and then again for breakfast at 4 a.m.

When am I gonna sleep?!?!?!

Hammam همام

After our visit to the Sahara, I was feeling pretty disgusting. We had sat on wet camels and endured a 10 hour bus ride back to Rabat, and through the entire weekend showers were limited. My friend and I decided that it was time to hit up the Hammam, (public bath). My host mom was excited to take us to our first Hammam experience. She filled a basket with my shampoo and soap and took us through the winding roads of the old Medina to a traditional Hammam.

This is how the Hammam works: you pay to go in, (about 10-20 Dirhams), and then you can pay extra to get some magical brown soap, and extra to have somebody personally scrub you all the way down. My friend Cassidy and I opted to just pay to get in and scrub ourselves, but it only took 5 minutes for my host mom to call in some ladies to scrub us down. Meanwhile dirt was falling off everywhere. They basically scrubbed a layer of skin off, and then they washed our hair for us. I swear I've never felt so clean in my life, especially because my regular shower situation at my house in Rabat is a bucket of water. (Not complaining).
Definitely contemplating going there every week. That's 4 more trips to the Hammam!

Anyway, so thankful for my host mom for bringing us to the Hammam, because without her we would have no idea what to do within the different chambers. Plus everybody knew that we were foreign so it was already awkward.

What else?
Well, traveling to Agdal, my friends and I had a lovely conversation in Arabic with our taxi driver about himself and sister. I gotta say I was feeling pretty accomplished about what we've learned in the past two weeks. Well, I was feeling accomplished until we had our first "small quiz" today that was actually 9 pages long. The struggle was real.

Either way, classes are moving along. We've  been keeping up with classes in the local dialect, calligraphy, and cooking! This week we also visited the Chellah, an ancient Roman settlement on the outskirts of Rabat, a school in the neighboring city, Sale, and the Bibliotheque National. (The new national library in Rabat).

I need to find a time to sleep between now and tomorrow. I forget that I actually need to sleep because I have school, but then again all I want to do is go out and experience life in Rabat, but then I come home and we don't eat dinner until 11 pm. (This is completely normal for Moroccans).
What's keeping me going is "cahua" (coffee), and "chobtz" (bread). Moroccans love their chobtz.

This weekend:
A trip to Tangier and Chefchaouen, both cities in the North of Morocco. Tangier is on the Mediterranean.


BELOW:
to clarify, that's not my house, it's my friend Zach's host family house. But it's beautiful.
& we have the lighthouse/cliffs that are a ten minute walk from my house.

Safari Adventures

I made it back to Rabat from the Sahara desert in one piece!

Our long weekend excursion began with a stop in the south of Morocco to see and feed some wild monkeys. (I've posted a picture).
We spent Friday night in Midelt, at a hotel in the middle of the desert town. I was expecting a shack on the side of the road, so I was so excited to see the full showers, outdoor pool, and cozy rooms.

Saturday was a long, unbearably hot day driving to the actual desert in a cramped bus with airconditioning malfunctions. Whenever we were driving through the mountains the bus would overheat and the airconditioning would stop working...and opening the windows did nothing as it was 90 degree air. We drove across the outer part of the desert to our campsite, where we each packed a bag for the night and hopped on the camels to travel over many sand dunes to our tents.

As soon as we saw the stars at night from the highest sand dune, there was no way that we would choose to suffer by sleeping inside the heat of the tents. After dancing around a campfire with our fellow slovenians who were camping beside us, we pulled blankets out on the sand to sleep.

All I can say is that the last thing I was expecting at that moment was a thunderstorm. The desert people that cooked our food and took us into the desert told us that it only rains about 30 times a year. I felt sorry for the desert cats as we booked it to our tents. Sand was blowing everywhere and lightning lit up the entire desert sky.
We prepared for a disgusting wet camel ride in the morning.

As for now, I'm back at school. Classes are a bit of a struggle because I'm trying to learn two things at once: Fusha, which is MSA (modern standard arabic) and Darija, the local dialect.