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.