Arabic Abroad

So as I write my final entry to you all, I’m lying on my bed back in Moulsecoomb after almost 12 hours of travelling. Worn out, I’m reflecting on the last three weeks. And trust me, there’s a lot to reflect on!
Today has been a bit surreal really. After spending three weeks in a place as different from home as chalk is from the proverbial cheese, we’ve found ourselves marvelling at every turn at the simplest things. Things like stepping off the plane into London Heathrow and finding billboards written in English. Or the fact that people actually stop for pedestrian crossings. Or the fact that one could buy a meal that wasn’t chicken and chips, and that the bottled drinks were €4 each in Paris, instead of less than £1 in Rabat. My lunch in the airport today was one of the most delicious I remember eating in a long time, simply because of the lack of lasagna in Morocco. That and the fact that we were eating somewhere between 3 and 5pm. We’re still not quite sure.
But the thing that threw us more than any of that was genuinely not knowing which language to use. It really took noticable effort to speak in English, having become so accustomed to speaking in broken Arabic-French for so long. We spoke in Arabic to French air hostesses, French waitresses, and English border force. And I’m convinced it won’t stop there. If you watch me over the next few days, I bet you’ll see me saying “shokrann” to my bus drivers and “asifa” to people in the street. Make sure you have a camera to hand in those moments – the looks on their faces will be worthy of exhibition.
The jumble of words going around in my head right now is really making me think about language as a whole, and how simply amazing it is! Thinking about the fact that the language we’ve been learning the past weeks is the language that a vast section of the world lives out their lives in, yet we don’t understand it, just baffles me. Somewhere in the world, someone’s first word wasn’t “Daddy”, it was “أبي”. The words that someone spoke on their deathbed, that will be carried around forever in the hearts of their loved ones, weren’t uttered in English. People are having arguments and sharing jokes and baring their souls right now, and if you and I were a fly on the wall, we would have absolutely no idea what was going on. How incredible! What a mind-boggling world we live in.
Someone from our class said that learning a language requires constant revision. This is true. Learning another language is certainly not the easy option in life. But if you remember anything at all about our adventures over the last weeks, please remember this: it really is worth it. We’ve had many a hilarious language blunder, not least of which was trying to ask a non-English-speaking man at Rabat airport if there was a kiosk available to print out boarding passes (yeah, try that if you’re bored one day!), and we’ve absolutely destroyed the language by some of our class mishaps, but after all the failures and the challenges and the confusion, we’ve emerged as, well, better communicators. Guys, just to squeeze this in, we are set on continuing our language learning into the next year, and if you get the chance, please try it. It’s an amazing privilege, for the time we have left, to be able to see into someone else’s world, get on their level, and relate to them, just by speaking the language that they live and dream in.
Well, I guess this is goodbye! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about the sowing of our travelly oats. All the best for the future! Thanks for tagging along on our adventure. You’ve been amazing company.

Hannah

It really hasn’t sunk in that this morning was our last class, and our last time at Qalam wa Lawh. I keep thinking back to our first morning when we realised with a shudder that we had to order breakfast completely in Arabic… Wow how much difference three weeks can make! I could go on about how I’ve matured and grown and how I’ve had such an amazing time, but I’ll save that for the tomorrow’s post that will invariably become mushy. Instead, I’ll tell you about our final trip to the souq that we had today.
The souq is an amazing place. It basically packs everybody and everything about the city into 2 square miles. If you’re ever in a Middle Eastern country and you want to taste the culture of the city, and even the whole country, get yourself to the souq. Today was the first time we’d experienced the souq at Ramadan, and though the people of Rabat aren’t eating during the day, we walked through Bab Boubiba straight into swarms of people around food stalls! Our teacher explained this to us yesterday though, and it’s not as weird as you might think. Do you remember when we had that meeting in school about going to uni, and amidst all the practical points they tell you “don’t do your grocery shopping when you’re hungry”. Same basic principal. So, all these people are shopping for Iftar, feeling hungry, so buying up entire stalls of bread, pastries, and dried fruit. Pushing through those aromatic crowds was quite a slow process, but seeing the jumble of stalls was well worth the heave. We walked past several of the tackier clothes and scarf stalls, and right in the middle of them all was a stall selling rows and rows of pigs trotters, with some of the offal hanging on silver meat hooks beside it. The smell wasn’t that great. After we’d got past the food stalls though, the crowds subsided and we could walk a but more easily. It was by no means chilled, but it was actually possible to stop and go at will. We did more of the same shopping process too – spot the thing, ask the price, scoff, get offered lower, keep scoffing until you get the price you want, pay, leave. Brilliant. But the shopping bit actually isn’t the most fun, it’s the being there and looking and experiencing it all. Have you ever been to a marginally organised jumble sale? Or maybe a car boot sale is a better example. Except literally no space between them. The souq is basically a maze of narrow streets with various wares covering every wall so you actually can’t tell the paint colour underneath. Tables are stationed in front, or walls erected to demark each territory, and the sound of the vendors and smell of spices follow you everywhere. It’s genuinely manic, but you can’t not enjoy the enormous plate-glass window it gives you into the way Morocco is.
We just returned from our final dinner out at Morocco’s equivalent of Nando’s – Coq Magique. We finished our meal and were walking home at about 11pm, and excepting the darkness, the streets genuinely felt like Brighton does around Churchill Square on a Saturday. Families with kids, people clustering around the ice cream parlour, clothes boutiques still lit up and selling… It’s so surreal, amd really unexpected! But the atmosphere is pretty nice really, and I’m so pleased that we got to sample it before we left.
Anyway, I’m off to bed to prepare for a full trip back tomorrow. By that, I mean sleeping, and charging my phone. Such a creature of my generation!
Goodbye for the penultimate time,

Hannah

I’ve been talking a lot about how it’s weird that we’re almost at the end of our trip, but today it went beyond words and genuinely felt like it was all coming too fast. We’ve said goodbye to our lovely afternoon teacher, booked the minibus to the airport, and even started thinking about packing. I know, organised right?
Looking back over the trip, I wonder what I’ve learned. It would be tempting to think that because I’m not fluent yet I have therefore learned nothing. But there are a few indications that that’s not quite true. Firstly, I passed the midterm! Woo! But that’s not the real expression of how much we’ve got out of the trip. It’s more easily readable in the fact that we understood most of our taxi-driver’s monologue on the way home from school today, and the fact that I dreamed in Arabic last night, or that when the heroine of this evening’s film walked into someone, in my head I said “asifa!” (I’m sorry). It’s more the fact that we can communicate better now than we did at the start, and that we can survive in the language outside of the four walls of Fulton 113. And that has definitely made it worth it.
Other than that, there really isn’t that much to say. We went out after dark for some food and we were neither killed nor maimed on the walk home, we made tomato and chickpea Moroccan soup in our final cooking club, and our sunburn is almost faded (although when someone suggested going to the beach earlier we all winced). But overall, we’re tired but happy, and preparing for the long journey back home, to a place where we can’t drop random Arabic words into our sentences at will. That will be so odd after all this time!
Anyway, off to sleep in time for our final full day. Wow what a thought! Stay tuned in for a more interesting last leg of our brilliant journey!

Hannah

And the days go on. It’s weird how, when you do ot every day, even the most amazing routine can become mundane sometimes. This time two weeks ago, we were buzzing about getting to learn Arabic sitting in a garden, and being able to talk to taxi drivers in Arabic, and getting on with people. And yet, with just a day and a half of classes left before we leave Qalam wa Lawh school, all of this is just part of our daily ‘bornamaj’ (or ‘schedule’. It was on today’s vocab list). This made the morning fairly ordinary, except for things like a spider falling on our teacher who promptly freaked right out, and an ensuing discussion on the species of the tree it fell from (an orange tree we think. The Lime school of thought was overruled.), as well as repremanding a classmate for talking about the spider getting up our teacher’s hijaab and the damage it could do, all whilst she was still recovering. Timing! Also, we had Ken (remember him?), confident in his philosophical ideas and his grasp on the Arabic language, tell us that “we sit on people’s lives” and “we sit on animals and other people” before realising that he wanted to say “we stand on the shoulders of giants”. You can’t knock his ambition anyway.
The afternoon was more fun, because of our trip to the challa! I can now tell you that it’s more than the “ruins of something old”, and the story is actually quite lovely, and how I understand it is this. Grab a cup of tea and a sponge finger, and I’ll begin.
A long time ago, there lived one of the Sultans of Morocco. He was married to the daughter of the current Sultan of Tunisia, but it was for political purposes alone, and held no affection. The Sultan of Morocco happened to travel to Europe and England, and whilst there, he heard about the beauty and intelligence of an English princess. Through all the stories about her, he fell in love with her, even before he saw her. He desired to marry her, but his father would not allow it, and he was forced to return to Morocco. After a period of time, his father died, as well as the father of his current wife. He decided to divorce her, and return for his English princess. The challa is the ruins of the palace that they lived in together during his reign, and they are buried side by side, with their son, who died when he was still a child. The palace must have been vast, yet all the rooms are roofless, the stones crumble under the sun, and every high place has atop it an enormous stork’s nest, with two of these massive birds in each one, the males clacking their beaks and trying to impress their wives. Yet, the gardens are still kept lush and green, and it’s a beautifully pleasant place. If you’re ever in Rabat, it’s worth an hour or two to visit.
Anyway, the remainder of the day has been much as normal, except the thrill of learning how to tell the time. It reminds me of learning that lesson for the first time. I remember sitting at a round table in primary school, in a group with Josie Atherton and Georgia Barron, with a yellow, red and blue plastic clock. Following the initial explanation, we had to write down the time on our clock. We wrote the number, and the o’, but we couldn’t spell “clock”. Those where the days. The same ones as when I simply had to correct my teacher because “magic” couldn’t possibly be spelled without a ‘j’, and when being told off for not being able to tie my own shoelaces by year 3, justified it by pointing out that Claire Lunnun still couldn’t say “yellow” properly. I find myself thinking a lot about the first stages of my learning as a kid, since I’m basically going through the same process again now. It’s a different language, yes, but somehow it still manages to take us all straight back to basics. And the smell of Play-Doh.
We are still adjusting to the Ramadan norms here, and are winding down to go home. But we’re excited for the prospect of cooking club again tomorrow (apparently pastry sweets are on the menu!), and for some final good memories and effective lessons, in language and otherwise, before we wend our way back to overcast and gravy-coated Englishness.
Thanks for sticking with us this far – you’re all troopers.

Hannah

So you remember yesterday when I said that being out at Ramadan is like being out at Christmas amd that we couldn’t possibly miss out on the experience? Well, if 25 adolescent boys with big sticks and enormous non-foody appetites make an amazing cultural experience, I’d be more than happy to stay on my grandmother’s sofa eating Yorkshire puddings for the rest of my life. Alice and Charlotte promised to come back bearing great and exciting tales. But they came home shaken and abused, and yes, even with bruises. They had taken a wrong turn up a darkened street, and before they emerged onto a lighted way again, this pack of boys had surrounded them and begun slapping and pinching and grabbing. Chaos ensued, with several men looking on, shocked, and literally thank God for the woman driving down the road with her baby, who told them in swift French to get into her car so that she could take them home safely. So, in the end, little damage was done. But genuinely, on the first night of Ramadan, ‘shomma!’ (shame on them). For those parents and friends reading, we are all still safe and secure, and going especially carefully after our well-taught lesson.

So after the ‘excitement’ of the early hours, today has been back to mediocre. I was telling Charlotte earlier that I feel like I’m running dry on all the insights we had when we first arrived. But I suppose that just means that we’re getting gradually used to life here, and are beginning to fit in and understand a little more. This in mind, it’s maybe a shame that there’s so little time left for us here. But nevertheless, there are maybe one or two more things to see and know.
We spent most of the day nursing our sunburn (there are still sting-y bellies and ankles in the house) and feeling a bit worse for the wear of a dehydrated beach day yesterday. So this evening after class, not feeling up to going out again (especially after last night), we went straight to Pizza Hut in Agdal to get takeaway and rushed home to watch a movie snuggled on the sofa (yes, we are absolute girls). Since there was still about an hour until Iftar (the Ramadan evening ‘break-fast’), as soon as we walked out the door with our pizza boxes into the almost-deserted street, we felt as obvious as a Tellytubby in a business meeting and as rude as thumbing your nose at the Pope. Suffice it to say, we got a taxi the three blocks to our apartment. Sadly for us though, the taxi driver was also observing the fast. We had been told in orientation that most people can get cranky and bad-tempered after no sustenance during a hot day, and this turns out to be absolutely accurate. Although we didn’t really have much of a choice, imagine how you’d feel if you were tired and hungry, and still settling into the pattern of being tired and hungry for the next month, and two people sit in close proximity with none of your sympathies, smelling out the whole cab with fresh pizza when there’s another hour of your shift before you can eat. Yeah, maybe I wouldn’t be that happy with those people either. Who can blame him for calling us infidels with drastic hand signals and zooming off into the ether, leaving rubber marks outside the entrance to our apartment block? After we’d paid him of course.
Well, with only three more days to go, tomorrow we visit the Challa (pronounced ‘shella’) with school. Hopefully this time I’ll be able to say more than “it’s the ruins of something old”. Goodnight all – more insights tomorrow let’s hope!

Hannah

You know that moment when you’ve been lounging on the beach all day, confident in the powers of your factor 50 Soltan, and you wake up from a delightfully warm and sunny nap during which you dried out from your recent refreshing swim in the sea, you turn to your friend, a contented smile gracing your lips, and she says “ooh your face looks a bit red Hannah. Maybe you’re just too hot?” Please tell me I’m not the only one that really hates that moment. The mood swiftly turns from thinking you’ve been the picture of beach beauty, to realising that you’ve been more the picture of a beached lobster. This conviction is later solidified when looking in the mirror jist before tumbling into the inevitable cold shower, where the removal of beach-attire reveals the full damage of the day. It’s a good job there’s nobody in Morocco that I want to be attractive to.
Our trip to the beach today though, in all other respects, was the best yet, being the first day of Ramadan here in Morocco. As I write, most families are making their ways to restaurants across the city to eat after Day One of the fast. A good side-effect of this for us today was that the beach was practically empty! Since the people observing Ramadan can’t even drink water during daylight hours, most of them very sensibly avoid too much sun. Result? Only one creepy man paying any negative attention to us all day! Alice and Charlotte have just gone out for dinner to sample Night One of Ramadan, which by all accounts is like going out on Christmas Eve. They have been commissioned to take many pictures and return with suitably splendid reports of what it’s all like. I’ll make sure I report back tomorrow for you all – there’s no way I could let you miss this chapter of incredible experience! Having said that, Rebecca and I are slumming on the sofas at the moment, opting to recover from our Day of Doing Nothing. It’s a hard life.
But, once again, it was so nice to just unwind and prepare for our last 4 days here (can we believe it?!). It feels so weird to think that this time in just 5 days I’ll be sleeping in my little bed back in Moulsecoomb, safe and snug, at the end of such a great adventure. I’ve learned and seen so many things, even beyond what I can put into words to share with you all. But there is still plenty of time to build ever-more of this cheesily “unforgettable” trip.
Please forgive the shortness of this entry – I’m late for an appointment with my aftersun.
More tomorrow!

Hannah

Today was the first day in two weeks when we’ve been deliciously inactive. Not a single alarm was set, we read books in bed for an hour after we woke up, we ate a breakfast that we bought the day before in the souq, and we spent all the time until almost lunchtime draped over the sofas to the stirring theme-music of Disney and Bollywood. Gotta love a good fairytale sometimes. I won’t lie – sometimes, though I’m twenty, I love dreaming away. And sometimes, I wander whether a beautiful, unthinkalbe happy ending is really as impossible as our culture says it is. Maybe the Something Better is still out there somewhere. And maybe, it’s for people like you and me too. Sorry for that tangent – the day’s been quiet enough to actually think about this kind of thing! Clearly too much time…
Anyway, once it got to lunchtime, and Rebecca and Charlotte had gone to Casablanca to see the mosque (globetrotting much!), Alice and I decided to go for a wander around our neighbourhood of Agdal, buy some more water, and explore a little bit. It was after experiencing what might have been mini-watermelons, and discussing how the woman begging on the street probably had more money than we did when you consider student debt, that we made the decision that shaped much of our afternoon – we bought henna. After getting one box of powder from one shop for 8 dirhams, and another of exactly the same box from another shop for 6 dirhams, we began the hunt for syringes to draw the patterns through. This was somewhat of a mission, as none of the little shops we looked in at first sold them. Well, they might have done. We didn’t know how to say “syringe”. So we just had to make rather dubious-looking signs. The remains of Alice’s henna helped prevent the shopkeepers getting the idea that we wanted the needles for anything, uh, untoward. Eventually, in the shop where they sold them, we were taught the name for a syringe (‘ibra’), and made our way to lunch. We decided to really push the boat out and go for a pot of ice-cream before the meal (shockers), where the salesman was reallt friendly and spoke brilliant English. Watching him fill the little yellow tub, we realised that you really have to be quite strong to be an ice-cream man. Who needs a gym anyway? We went to Pincho’s again (the pizzeria, before you judge us for going three times in two weeks), and had a tasty-but-made-unremarkable-by-the-service meal, and then made our way home to practise with the henna before the girls came home. So sitting out in the sunshine and the breeze, letting our creative juices flow through the syringe and onto our feet, we had a lovely unwind in one of my favourite places in Rabat – the balcony off our room. Most of the evening was spent with the girls too, doing more of the same.
So, today was not full of adventure or daring or courage. It was not about hardships conquered or dangers faced. But, in its own way, it was special, beautiful, and full of good things.

N.B. this is Friday. The WiFi (or WeeFee as we’ve affectionately begun to term it) isn’t reaching me, and frankly, the day was too tiring to get up and locate it. Please bear with.

Well, the police didn’t come to take us all away in the end. So we think we’ll still be ok in the usual school location for our third and final week (whaaaaat?!). And that’s great. Though I think nearly all of us would have quite liked it if they’d walked in just as we were about to take our midterm… I don’t think I’ve ever finished a test so quickly in my life as I did the last question today. We were given an hour, half of which was fine, the second half just slipped away so quickly that I wrote a page of writing assessment in seven minutes. Just as an aside, we were definitely put in the right class – the test was as hard as our Arabic final this term. To all those people who told me to “have a nice holiday”, you’re very funny. I thank you.
So once we’d finished our exam and draped ourselves in the garden’s wicker chairs to recover, we realised that Billy and James were leaving in less than 10 minutes to go back to America. Cue laments. But in the end we decided to go to the souq with them to do their last-minute souvenir shopping. So we caught the tram to the Old City (which was a lovely clean smooth experience, tram advert right there), and marched straight back into the breach that is souq shopping. We had a great time. We discovered the ripple effect of good bargains when Billy bought a bag that he haggled down to 100 dirhams because it was exactly the same as mine that I bought last week, and James bought a rug for his floor. Yes, an actual Moroccan rug. And the guy selling it to us was happy and smiley and old and wrinkly, and spoke clear Fosah Arabic to us. He told us he was a student, but almost every word was a joke. He asked my name, and I told him it was Hannah. “Yes, in Morocco” he said, “Hannah is an Arabic name. What are you called in England?” He took a little convincing that I didn’t discriminate between countries and that I was called Hannah wherever I went. When we left, we all shook his hand, and we’d made a friend. Once they’d bought everything they needed to fill their cases and gladden the hearts of their friends, we had a smiley, huggy, fairly emotional goodbye on the corner of two busy souq streets, and Alice, Charlotte and I stood and waved them off. Emotional much.
After a little more wandering, where we met another happy smiley stall-owner who taught us the correct pronunciation for a few words and taught us a few more, we bundled into a hot taxi to quench our sorrows with a very ex-pat KFC and a rubbish Fox-Movies special. On the way, we struck up a conversation with our Hawaiian-shirted taxi-driver. I will admit, I felt a lot like I was in a Hollywood movie when we discovered that he was an ex-Marine for the Moroccan Army, and pulled out pictures of his two curly-haired, wide-eyed daughters aged three and eight. What a dream. So, after watching Fox-Movies’ finest, Reign of Fire (something about Christian Bale fighting a tyrannical community of dragons), here I am by lamplight, remembering all the great things of the day, and being excited for more tomorrow.
Sweet dreams!

Hannah

Oh my goodness guys, bombshell imminent!! I could tell you menial things like the fact that we had ragees for breakfast after making them at cooking club yesterday, or that Billy is feeling better (which is actually good news), but we’ve all frankly forgotten everything that happened before 8:30 this morning.
Yesterday we were told to assemble at school for a meeting of all students and staff for 8:30am, the subject of which even the teachers didn’t know. It turns out, the government needs this property for some reason, nobody knows. And as a result, they are probably coming into school today to close it. Yes, really. We will be continuing classes in a different place, but the next two days are, like Elvis, going to be “All Shook Up”. I mainly feel bad for all the people that have committed their whole summers to studying here. It’s amazing of them to be so excited and brave to want to learn this language, and having everything change, having to spend more money either on food here or on a new flight home, is, to many of them, devastating. The school has been amazing in getting the transition sorted and still being so supportive, but a few of us still think that we should ship out a gaggle of Sussex students to make a ring around the building and fight the Moroccan police with ouds when they come to take us away!
Anyway, on to the more exciting events of the day then. Well, maybe not more exciting, but certainly more fun! Billy and James go home tomorrow (sad times), so to make the most of the time we have left, after class today, we went to the beach. No, not the same one we were mobbed and hassled at, but having learned our lesson, we went to a beach much further away, near a little town called Temara. To get there took 3 legs – Petit Taxi (all blue Fiats by the way. Cute.) to a neighbourhood called Geish Oudaya. This neighbourhood is much more like the traditional rural Morocco you might expect. Despite the many abandoned high-rise building projects we passed on the road, the whole place is residential, with a little supermarket (like a big indoor souq stall) on the central corner, and lots of cafes selling coffee to men glued to the wide-screen football-showing televisions. Aside from that, the smell was altogether more, well, ripe, since there were several horse-and-carts around to ferry people to the next town. These had bright orange tassels hanging from the roof of the carriage, they were papered inside with what appeared to be floral lino, and the horses were eating what appeared to be sand, but later turned out to be not-quite-enough cornmeal. Maybe the drivers should be charging more than 2 dirhams (about 7p) per person. Anyway, all five of us squeezed into one of these contraptions, and sallied forth to the next town, from where we caught a Temara Petit Taxi (turquoise Fiats this time) to the beach. This beach was altogether nicer. We got some stares, of course, but soaking up the rays on the sand after a dip in the lovely blue water, we were perfectly safe, mainly because we blended in better than usual. Is it just me, or have you noticed that on pretty much every beach in the world, everybody behaves the same, and almost looks the same too. Why is that? Weird. There is probably a government-issue International Manual for Regular Beach Activity available somewhere. Anyway, as I say, doing usual beach things, there were no issues. The interest came when all three of us girls wanted to change. We thought the best way to hide everything was to make a towel-tent. Over the total time, we really became rather good: one of us squatted down, amd the others held three towels around us, and one over the top. Perfect. Except that this exhibition is not to be found in the International Manual for Regular Beach Activity. And thus, everybody stared, and most that stared laughed. However, leaving the beach with dignity intact (say nothing…), we wandered off to find a Grand Taxi back to Geish Oudaya, and a restaurant. However, this is not as easy as it sounds. A Grand Taxi works more like a bus than a taxi. You have to catch it from a specific point to a specific point, and though it can fit six, you usually agree a price before you get in for your group to get where you want to go. Sounds fine. But the snag comes in the “agreeing a price before you get in” bit. We were already foreign which didn’t help our effort to blend in, but a group of five white people discussing a taxi price in a mix of Fosah and French with two or three Grand Taxi drivers was enough of a spectacle to draw a crowd. About forty people in Temara, it seems, think that taxi-hailing is a spectator sport. Great. After some hard bargaining by Alice the Power Shopper, we managed to fix a price (James paid for us all and wouldn’t let us pay him back. Gentleman.) and all get in. You know I said that Grand Taxis can fit six? It’s all lies. Four of us shoehorned into the back seat, and with no way of winding down the windows, it was quite snug. Just to make the attention complete, Alice got an offer of marriage through the window before we drove off. I just wonder what he expects her to do! “Oh ok then let me phone my parents and we’ll get it sorted! Where can I get a dress around here?” Perhaps not.
Before we ate, we went back to James and Billy’s host family’s house so they could change and whatever else men do before they go out. That meant that we met their host mum and sister, who were really lovely, got to sample some hilawayaat (pastry sweets) which I nearly took from the plate with my left hand (BIG no-no by the way) but which were delicious, and got to see a beautiful Moroccan home, with the tiled walls and padded benches and wooden tables. After this, the hunt for a cafe began. After walking up one road twice, taking a wrong turn, and sitting down twice before realising that they didn’t do food, we settled in a little place called Cafe Sinastra for coke and pizza. Ordering the pizza was an issue, and we nearly got fish pizza by accident (yes, really. Vom.), but eventually got food and drink that was made all the more acceptable by the presence of WiFi, good friends, and a happy maitre d’ who asked to have his photograph taken with us at the end of the meal. What a cutie.
So, a full full full and really lovely day, so we’re all ready for a nice relaxing mid-term exam tomorrow. Oh no wait…

Hannah

Last night, at the same time as deciding to watch another hour of CSI:Las Vegas, we decided that it was absolutely impractical to get up at 6:30 and that we were going to have a lie-in. So even though the sun shining through our lack of blind woke me up at 7:16am, starting at a more student-friendly (i.e. Late) time was most refreshing. Breakfast might not have been omelette and crepes, but we had vast reserves of watermelon for sustenance. Having a full dish each this morning, we’re still only just half way through it. Well, they say you are what you eat, so watch me turning green.
Talking about people being green, Billy wasn’t feeling too great today. There’s been a 24-hour bug going around, and seeing him out of sorts today was so sad, when the only two times I’ve seen him not smiling were after losing his sandal and getting ripped off by the taxi man. What a guy. It was a bit glum in class today learning the new vocabulary too. The words were not too hard, but included was “she died” and “saddening or distressing”. Fortunately we could use lighter examples, like “In my house there is no food. It is saddening”. Better than “two years ago, my mother was in a car accident.” “Really?” “No. It was all I could think of”. Great imagination there Hannah.
As a lighter option, this afternoon we had cooking club again! We were making an amazing thing between a crepe and bread. To begin with, it was just cornmeal, flour and water, and we dared to think that it might actually be healthy. False alarm, we were literally rolling in butter my friends. I’m talking an entire dish of melted butter and oil mixed together, into which we were to plunge our hands, and knead into the dough enough fat to supply seven heart attacks . Yes, it tasted amazing.
One of the best things about studying in a language school is the language humour that pours forth at every opportunity. I think my favourite one was, when talking about Life, Love and Deeply Profound Things, Charlotte’s comment “My life is an open kitaab”.
Another great language blunder was to be found in James’ Beginner 3 class syllabus. His discussion topic for yesterday was “Do women are equal to men?” Well said Google Translate. But really, it was a fascinating discussion by all accounts. It wasn’t so much the fact that they are or not, but how women are treated as unequal throughout the world. Sobering topic huh? But it’s been on our minds a little what with, well, being here. One of the main things we find hard to deal with in our culture is the fact that while we are equal, we are different. It doesn’t seem quite right to say this, but it’s true! We are not the same, yet working together, we are something beautiful and so valuable. But in the world, we see so little of this. Even watching Mulan with the girls earlier, I was thinking, “do women are equal to men?”
Yes, we watched Mulan earlier. Like how I slipped that in? We came back to the flat with the sincere intention of studying hard for the midterm on Friday. Settling down with our books, we began to revise verbal rules and terribly studious things like that. But we all know that Girly Study Sessions often turn into Paint Our Nails and Watch Disney Sessions. Please tell me I’m not the only one? But still, we have plenty of time chiselled out for some proper revision of all the many things we’ve learned in our 10 days of being here. Thinking about it, there would be nothing sadder than having this amazing experience, and going home with nothing to show for it. But even if all we’ve learned is to be more confident, we’re already seeing fruit in our communication with our waiters and taxi drivers. Genuinely, I’m absolutely loving not using English!! With a crazy mix of Arabic and French, we usually manage. And realising that you just got through an entire taxi ride without using English once is such a great feeling!
Happy days here in Rabat, loving the joy of communication and language. Beautiful world!
Hannah