Considering we’re here to study, we did relatively little today. Finding out this morning that our morning teacher was ill, we then had all morning until 2pm off! Of course, we should have been terribly studious and borne in mind that we will have extra hours to catch up over the next few days. But, being students, we went shopping.

There is a mall up the road from the school, which a few of us decided to mooch around. After an obscenely sweet hot chocolate and a fruit smoothie, the likes of which will never be found in England, the three of us went shopping. We’ve had a few conversations about the women here and how they cover up so much, but there was none of this to be seen around the mall earlier. In fact, there were one or two girls wearing an outfit that I wouldn’t wear in Brighton let alone Rabat! Apart from a few stores that we don’t have, we could have been anywhere in the world. Weird compared to the souq which could only be North Africa, and to the trained eye, could be nowhere but Morocco. But if one of the points was to find out about the country, then seeing the highly developed, well-heeled neighbourhood is just as important as seeing thr traditional unfettered culture of the Old City. All part of life’s rich tapestry I suppose, though often I find it so sad seeing a million-pound development in a city where most homes don’t have carpets. All too often, I want to weep at the tourist industry!

This afternoon, we had our 4-hour class, and if we had been in any doubt that there was any more for us to learn of the Arabic language, today those doubts were driven far into the wide blue yomder. Today, we learned about a slightly painful thing called the Masdar. Basically, it changes a verb to a noun, like “I like to swim” becomes “I like swimming”. This is fine, but there are ten different forms of verbs which take different rules, and the rule for the fist form is that there isn’t a rule at all. Stoked for tomorrow’s class! It’s hard, but it feels so good to be learning so much, and we’re so happy.

Today was our housemate’s birthday, so we ate Japanese tonight – a delightful change from fries again! Chatting again with some fascinating people was so good, if anything just for learning people skills! We’re back to the West tonight though, with CSI:Las Vegas on the telly 🙂

Settling down to dream about art club tomorrow… Eek! Can’t wait.

Happy Tuesday all!

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 :)