Phew! We’ll sleep well tonight!
So today has been a weird mix of hard work and doing nothing. Yet even doing nothing in warm weather is effort!

The hard work was embodied in a test so difficult that we didn’t even understand most of the questions let alone the answers. To make it worse, the questions were written in English. Awkward. We had two hours, sitting in the garden, surrounded by our new friends, all chewing our lips and our pens over things like “change these sentences from nominal to verbal”. Most of the following sentences just looked like someone had fallen asleep on the keyboard. Nevertheless, despite the difficulty of the written test, at least it wasn’t humiliating. Which brings me to the oral component… It’s really not that great when, seated across from a prospective tutor, you end up in mortal danger of swallowing your own foot. The conversation, translated of course, went something like this:

Tutor: what do you do in your free time?

Me: oh, uh… uh… um, could you repeat that?

Tutor: What do you do in your free time?

Me: (interpreting “free time” as “at the moment”) well, I’m studying. In this school.

Tutor: what do you do in your FREE TIME?

Me: oh. Sorry.

Yeah. Hello Beginners One.

No, we mock, but really it’s been absolutely brilliant. This was embodied not in hard tests or embarassing Arabic conversations, but in the several hours spent chatting under the parasols in the school garden (yes, that was ‘school garden’. Brilliant.), spending time with people you’d never seen before, enjoying the beautiful sunshine and the free-flowing conversation (and sun-tan oil) of  people with mutual interests. Get thrown into a completely bizarre situation with people, and it’s amazing how quickly you bond!

Later in the day, we went on a tour of Rabat in the minibus. It was only for an hour or so, but even so, Rabat is such a beautiful city. As Billy from New York described it, “it’s beautiful in a different way to most cities. Kind of like a rustic beauty”. And, by the way, he’s completely right. You know, it might be nice to see fascinating cities like this from the safety of a sofa and a TV screen or a glossy magazine, but the “rusticness” can only be experienced when you’ve got the wind in your hair and the sea air in your lungs and yes, even the dust in your hair. The whole city has the air of the kind of old man everyone has met at least once – that old man that doesn’t have to say a word, but you just know has dozens of stories he could dredge up at a moment’s notice about any time in history you could care to mention, telling each story with words the colour and richness of any oil painting. And then he opens his mouth to invite you to get lost in his world…

…and you realise that he does ‘t speak English. It seems funny that if people can’t speak Arabic or French here you’re really rather lost. We were wondering yesterday why the second language wasn’t English. But why in the world should it be? We are so awful at getting humbly into other people’s worlds and seeing through their eyes. And their eyes in Morocco are Arabic eyes. The entire tour today was in Arabic. I didn’t understand more that one word in three, but I was so glad that for once we had to be the ones trying to adapt to someone else’s normality. I think one of the things that makes me so disappointed is seeing that family – the ones dressed entirely in khaki with sunburnt skin except for where their shades have been, sitting in a local restaurant, with a poor waiter at their tablem looking hopelessly befuddled as the father yells “DO YOU HAVE FISH AND CHIPS?” Sometimes I think we need to learn the art of empathy and crawl into someone else’s world. They may laugh at us when we get it wrong (which they certainly do), but I think that secretly they like it a lot better than me yelling in their face, totally unfazed, “DO YOU HAVE FISH AND CHIPS?”

Anyway, onwards we plod my friends. Anticipating the start of class tomorrow, and above all, the discovery of our class allocations!

Goodnight for now. I have to say, by the way, you guys are such good company, putting up with all my language rants! It’s lovely to have you 🙂 Night!

Hannah

About Aimee Hannah Mccallum

I am a final year BA International Relations student at Sussex University, and I'm also studying the Arabic Language Elective Pathway. Alongside this, I am acting as a Student Language Ambassador, in hopes of convincing the world that a language is a beautiful thing :)