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.