Sahara Desert

What I've been up to for the past week:

On Thursday night, I was sitting in my living room in my pajamas when my host father motioned for me to go outside with him. Because I had recently put my clothes into the washing machine, I thought that he was trying to tell me that I should hang them up to dry. However, when we went outside, he got on his motorcycle and my host sister (Aya) hopped on as well. So then we ended up driving 30 minutes to go out to dinner, with me still in my pajamas. Aya was so tired on the way home that she kept falling asleep on the motorcycle, meaning she kept slumping over and almost falling off. My host father (Abdulwahed, a police officer) was not concerned. When we returned home at 11, a second dinner was waiting on the table. Usually, there are five meals a day at my house. And everyone gets mad if I stop eating.


Friday morning, after little sleep because of my two late dinners, we left for the Sahara desert. After a lot of driving, I ended up here:

The group took a camel ride from our tents (I slept in a tent! With spiders and scarabs!) to the sand dunes to watch the sunset. Some more pictures of that:

Some other miscellaneous Moroccan things:

• My host family is so nice to me. When I returned from the Sahara, there was a pile of freshly folded laundry on my bed and my room was cleaned.
• Someone's host mother put sugar cubes in a glass of Sprite because it wasn't sweet enough. Other foods that have had sugar inexplicably added: pasta, jam, and orange juice.
• My host sister, Imane (16), wears a head covering but no one else in the family does! I would like to get to the bottom of this.
• A Moroccan boy in Fez had a crush on me, in the words of his host sisters, "because you are smaller than he is and don't talk too much." And that summarizes Moroccan men.
• I started my internship today, and the museum is very unusual. There are rocks with prehistoric engravings that are hung on the walls. The walls appear to have been painted recently, and the exhibits also appear to have been painted a bit. This is a very Moroccan thing to me, to not care that prehistoric artifacts got red paint on them.

This blog post didn't really have content or a direction, but it did have pictures, so I hope that suffices.

2.5 Weeks Later

To all of my adoring fans, I've finally succumbed to the pressure to start blogging, so you can rest easy once again. I am currently at the IES Abroad center in Rabat, and I just finished my first Modern Standard Arabic class. For the past two weeks though, I have been taking a Darija class, which is the Moroccan colloquial dialect of Arabic. Besides the Arabic alphabet, Darija and Modern Standard have almost nothing in common. I will also be taking a French class, North African politics class, and an internship course. I will be interning at the Archaeological Museum in Rabat. I don't know why I was placed there, but I think my program was so surprised to have a biology major in their midst, that they didn't know what to do with me.

I currently live in a four room apartment in the old medina of Rabat, with a couple and their four daughters. Even though the house is painfully small, my family is so nice that it doesn't matter. Like all the host families here, they are very intent on making me eat all the time. This morning, I was ready to leave for school, but I hadn't eaten all of my breakfast, so my host father wouldn't let me leave. Every time I tried to stand up, he would gently push me back down and tell me to finish breakfast. By the end of breakfast, I had five minutes to get to my school that is a half hour walk away. So my host dad took me to school on his motorcycle (Sorry Mom!). Speaking of transportation, the driving here is crazy. I don't think there are any actual traffic laws. Anyways, most of the food here is wonderful, but I've had a few run-ins with some unusual foods. On Fridays, every family in Morocco has cous cous for lunch, which is delicious. But this past Friday, my host family served sour milk as the drink to go with cous cous. The milk was intentionally sour. It was less than appetizing.

Rabat itself is a wonderful city. I was apprehensive about coming to a quieter city in Morocco, but Rabat is perfect. It's on the Atlantic coast, so the weather has been nothing but perfect and my house is a ten minute walk from the kasbah, which looks like this:

These aren't my pictures, but it's pretty all the same!

This weekend, I went to visit Casablanca for an afternoon. Though Casablanca itself wasn't my favorite, the second biggest mosque in the world is there, and it's the only mosque in Morocco where "non-believers" can enter. Here are some pictures from that:

So far, everyone in Morocco has been very helpful and friendly (sometimes too friendly), and very receptive to my broken French and Arabic.

Some final pictures from my trip to Volubilis (Roman ruins in the countryside) and Moulay Idriss.