Qissatna

Travel Update

2013-05-18T11:47:00.002-05:00

Hello all!

J just wanted to let you know that she has arrived safely in Morocco. She's in her apartment. The weather is gorgeous and she'll be meeting with some of the people she'll be working with later today.

Hello Again!

2013-05-18T08:54:00.000-05:00

This post is actually from J.

Hello again!

It’s amazing how much has happened since our last post – we’ll definitely be trying to stay a bit more on top of the blog in the future. To briefly sum up:

1. Meknes remained awesome.

2. Due to complicated logistical issues with our university, we had to return to the US. For the spring semester, rather than stay for the entire school year as we’d originally hoped.

3. The upside to that is we both graduated! Yay!

4. Over the summer, I worked as an Arabic tutor, which was by far my most favorite job ever. The students were fantastic, and I’ve become good friends with many of them.

5. A got a job at a local health food store. It’s full time, offers benefits, and his coworkers are fantastic. It’s not really what he wants to be doing long term, but it’s a good job for now.

6. So, for a long term goal, A is working on getting his teaching certification so he can get a position teaching high school in the fall. We’ll see how that goes – we certainly know jobs in the public sector aren’t easy to find right now – but we’re hopeful that it could work out well.

7. I’ve entered a two year master’s degree program in international studies. The fall was rough, but the spring went much better and I’m pretty excited about how next fall is shaping up.

8. A and I have made some drastic changes to our diet that I’m betting he’ll want to write about more later. The short version (for me) is:

No wheat. Little gluten. Few grains. Limited meat. All organic. No corn. No tomatoes. No potatoes. No added sugar. No added ingredients or preservatives… and I’m probably forgetting a lot. On the other hand, we’re both MUCH healthier, many of my fibro symptoms have disappeared, and the food we do eat is delicious.

9. Today, I left for five weeks to intern with a human rights group in Morocco. I’ll be working with sub-Saharan migrants, most of whom have no legal status in Morocco and are trying to gain entry into Europe. None of my coworkers speak English. A will be staying behind, so I’ll be alone… and I’m simultaneously terrified and really, really excited. I don’t know how reliable my internet connection will be, so it’s likely that most of the updates will be coming from A.

Meknes: City of Awesome, Part 1

2011-11-28T06:54:00.000-06:00

One of Morocco's famous date palms.

So, lots to talk about. Funny how that happens when you neglect you blog for several weeks.

First, J and I have both mostly been in better health for the past few weeks. We're still too tired because of the bed here. I think it might be older than I am. Other than that, though, we've only had minor aches and ailments. No pink eye, no long lasting stomach distress, no fevers, and no food poisoning. Thanks for all your prayers!

Second, classes are going well. J is making leaps and bounds in her Arabic. She's even able to get a lot out of listening to news broadcasts. She can't understand them nearly to her satisfaction, but she can at least follow the general topic of conversation quite well. My classes are also going well. I'm flying through the material, and I've found that I can stumble my way through reading Harry Potter in Arabic. I probably only follow 25% of what's going on, but I do follow it. It's amazing how important already knowing a story is to understanding. Besides knowing all the names and characters, knowing the general thrust of the plot allows me to figure out much more than I otherwise would.

The platform for Rabat's main train station.

Third (and our final subject for this post), two weekends ago J and I visited the city of Meknes. This is the city that J and spent six weeks in two summers ago. It's about an hour from the city of Fez, of headgear fame.

To put it shortly, our day trip was fantastic. We were expecting to enjoy visiting all of our old haunts, but we were not expecting to enjoy them quite so much.

First, we got to train station about five minutes before our train left. J and I have done a fair bit of travelling in our time, and we can rarely afford to cut it so close. So it was kind of gratifying not to have to wait half an hour in an uncomfortable terminal this time. There really is something immensely liberating about not travelling with most of your earthly possessions weighing you down, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, the train ride was uneventful. J dozed most of the trip (got up early in the morning so we could have breakfast in Meknes) and I read a book. We found our stop without too much trouble or stress, and upon leaving the station were accosted by about three cab drivers offering us rides. This was a fun bit of nostalgia for us. In Rabat, taxi drivers almost always use their meters and are rarely aggressive. In our first trip to Morocco, however, we usually had to bargain for our fair, which is a stressful thing to do with tons of luggage. This time around however, we had no intention of taking a cab, so aggressive cab drivers were a fun contrast rather than something to deal with.

Rabat has gates, but they don't have the beauty or
craftsmanship of the gates of Meknes.

Right outside the train station in Meknes, there was a cafe, and since we hungry, J and I decided this was as good a place as any for breakfast. It was a fortunate decision. The food was tasty, as usual for Moroccan breakfasts (usually some combination of bread, sugar, orange juice, and uncarbonated caffieine), but the tea was the best I've ever had. Mint leaves floated in our cups, which left me wary at first. But after one taste I was wondering how I had ever been satisfied with the dishwater (relatively speaking) that I get in Rabat. It was fantastic.

Fueled and ready to go, J and I walked over a few streets to the our old apartments. We had walked these same streets many times before, and it was bizarre to see them again. We saw shops that we hadn't thought about for over a year, places where we had gotten ice cream, and streets that hadn't changed. It's the same place, but it changed without us. Like it's this living thing that won't wait for our return to keep growing and changing. Somehow all the new things we saw made us appreciate the old even more. It felt like coming home to a family member you hadn't expected to see.

That poster of the old woman that looks over the carnival
was there when J and I lived in Meknes. It was gratifying
to see that some things hadn't changed, even if the changes
included a carnival.

But J and I hadn't seen anything yet. When we got to the main square, it became clear that somebody upstairs likes us, or at the very least wanted us to have a good time that day. In front of my apartment had been a large open square. When we came in sight of that square, we were amazed at what we saw. But when I saw it, I knew that J and I were going to have a good day.

I mean, it's always a good day when the carnival comes to town, right?

Eid Al Kabir

2011-11-08T16:39:00.000-06:00

Sorry I've been so unreliable about posting here. I'd like to promise I'll get better (and I really hope to!) but...well, living life here is a lot more interesting than writing about it. So, I tend to get distracted.

Take yesterday, for example. Yesterday was 'Eid al-Kebir (literally, "The Big Holiday*") In most of the rest of the Muslim world, it's called 'Eid al-Adha (or "Holiday of the Sacrifice.") Whatever you call it, it's a holiday to commemorate a story that can be found in both the Qur'an and the Bible: God called Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son, and Abraham was obedient until the very last moment, when God told Abraham not to do so, rewarded him for his faith and obedience, and sent him a ram to sacrifice, instead. Interestingly, the one major difference is that in the Judeo-Christian version of the story, God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac (who Jewish people consider to be their ancestor.) In the Qur'anic version, Abraham is told to sacrifice Ishmael (guess who Arabs believe that they are descendants of?)

Anyway, the central part of the celebration involves each family that can afford it buying and slaughtering an unblemished ram of their own. Afterwards, they eat one half of it themselves and give the other half to the poor. For the past month or so, we've seen a steadily-increasing number of rams in our neighborhood, and during the last week especially it seemed like they were everywhere. By the weekend, you could barely have a single conversation without being interrupted half a dozen times by the bleating. And while the smell wasn't quite as bad as you might expect, it certainly wasn't enjoyable...

On Sunday, H (the father of the family we live with) had bought a ram of his own. I don't know if we've ever described this house in detail, but it's very, very nice. Old (we have strong reason to believe it was built in the 1300s) but still lovely with some incredibly ornate mosaic decorations. And it's clear that the family is pretty well off...so try to keep that in mind when you imagine walking in through the (big, ornate) front door and see a ram standing calmly in the front entryway (just below an beautifully decorated calligraphy painting), held back by a table that's been laid on its side. H was clearly very proud of the ram and eagerly asked us what we thought of it. After we assured him that it was beautiful (and it really was), he introduced us to the ram as his friends from America. So that was nice, I guess. H and Y (the younger daughter) both seemed quite taken with the ram in general. H mostly seemed excited to have such a lovely animal (and he's just a cheerful man in general) while Y, who can be quite shy, seemed to love quietly petting it.

Anyway, H and M (the mother) had already made it clear that we were invited to spend the day celebrating the 'Eid with them, and we - eager to be good guests - had asked around to see what would be expected of us for the celebration. We were told by several people that there were two important things: first, to bring some sort of gift (ideally something white, such as milk or sugar or a sugary snack); and second, to buy and wear traditional Moroccan clothing, which should be new and relatively fancy.

The gift was easy, but the clothes were a bit of a challenge. We had both actually bought some clothes last summer, the first time we were in Morocco, but as we had been planning on being in Turkey, we had left them behind. Since money's pretty tight, we debated skipping the new clothes, but decided to go ahead and splurge because (a) we hadn't bought much of anything for souvenirs yet, (b) we wanted to be good guests, and (c) we're hoping to come back to Morocco plenty of times in the future, so we should get plenty of use out of any outfits we buy.

Unfortunately, we didn't have a chance to go clothes shopping until Sunday, and by then all but one of the clothes stores in our area was closed. That one had a lot of lovely outfits, but most of them were WAY out of our price range (as in, $150-200 each.) On top of that, there was the fact that we didn't really know what to look for. And the fact that I way overthink things. So, for example, I knew that the best thing to wear was something white. But I couldn't find anything that fit and was affordable in that color. But then I started worrying about how other colors would come across (like, would I inadvertently do the equivalent of wearing black at a wedding or bright pink at a funeral or something like that?) And then it really hit me that I was completely clueless about Moroccan fashion. Like, obviously I know what people on the street wear, but I don't have the first idea about what different styles convey. So I could easily show up dressed in the equivalent of a 40-year-old housewife's outfit, or a 16-year-old's prom dress, without realizing it. And then I tried to just ignore those voices in my head, do the best that I could, and trust that at a minimum they'd appreciate the effort...but then somehow all the outfits I was picking were WAY too big. But because the style of clothing was something I was completely unfamiliar with, I seemed to be incapable of eyeballing anything and figuring out how it fit on me. Apparently it was bad enough that the 20-something man who worked there stopped me, on more than one occasion, before I even made it to the dressing room, to tell me to put the clothes I had picked out back because they were way too big.

Anyway, the pressure of needing to find something RIGHT NOW plus the money concerns and the color/style concerns and the fact that I seemed to be hopeless at finding anything my size really started getting to me. I think one of the other men working there (who was probably at least 60 years old) realized it, because he called me over and handed me something to try on. Which, amazingly, was one of the least-expensive items in the store. And fit perfectly. And was really pretty. And mostly white. So, the good part is, a really nice man helped me find the perfect outfit for the 'Eid! The bad part is, I'm apparently so hopeless that I need fashion advice from little old Moroccan men! Oh well...I think I've said this before, but Morocco really has a way of making me swallow my pride, which certainly isn't a bad thing. Mostly.

So. Yesterday morning, Andrew and I set our alarm extra early so we'd be sure to be ready when the family called us down for breakfast (we had asked what time it would be, and just got the response "Oh, we'll call for you.") We dressed in our brand new Moroccan party clothes, took lots of pictures, and when the time came, gave ourselves one last look in the mirror before proudly coming down to meet H...who was wearing blue jeans and a sweater. And then we saw M, who was wearing khakis and a T-shirt. And soon after, Y joined us, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt. For what it's worth, though, they both seemed to love our (apparently completely unnecessary) new clothes. Although H did mention that A looked rather like Osama bin Laden. He really needs to shave his beard...

After breakfast, we joined the family to watch (on TV) a concert that had apparently been put on last night. There were an enormous number of musicians, including (according to M) some extremely famous ones. We noticed that the area they were playing in looked very familiar...and M confirmed that it's a part of the city that we literally walk through every single time we go to school.

All I could think of was last summer, when we celebrated our first Moroccan holiday (Throne Day) with a family we'd gotten to know in Meknes. We had asked them what they recommended we do to get the most out of the holiday, and they'd quickly invited us to spend it with them at their house. We had eagerly agreed and had a lovely meal together. After eating, everyone was relaxing and watching the TV when we heard a succession of startlingly loud booms. We asked the family what the noise was, and the father casually replied, "Oh. That's the cannons." The moral of the story being, of course, that while hanging out with Moroccan families is fantastic, sometimes they fail to mention things that we might find interesting. Like cannons. Or live world-class music events taking place less than a mile away. But back to yesterday.

A little while after we began watching the concert, the TV switched to show a mosque where the king (among many others) was praying. Watching the service felt surprisingly like viewing a Christmas or Easter Christian service on TV in the U.S. Which, I suppose, shouldn't really be a surprise at all. Once the service ended, the TV showed the king slit the throats of two rams, which was the official "go ahead" for our family to kill theirs (the king is supposed to be the first one to do it.)

WARNING: FOLLOWING IS A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF OUR RAM BEING KILLED. IF YOU'D PREFER TO SKIP IT, SCROLL DOWN TO THE NEXT MESSAGE IN ALL CAPS.

Ok, for those of you who are still here, we turned around and saw that a butcher and his assistant had arrived at some point during the show, and they were ready for action. A and I had briefly debated whether we wanted to watch the ram being killed, and basically agreed that we should both be able to handle it just fine, and it was probably a chance that we'd only get once. For anybody who cares, I have a lot of problems with excessive cruelty to animals, but I've got little problem with eating meat otherwise. This ram had obviously been treated well and was going to be killed quickly and humanely, so besides being a bit nervous, I didn't have any real objection to what was about to happen.

Basically, they pulled the ram to the inner room, where all the furniture had been moved out of the way and a big tub of water had been brought out. H and the butcher's assistant held the ram down, while the butcher quickly slit the ram's throat. The most disturbing part, I think, came next: A and I aren't entirely sure just when the ram died, but its body definitely kept twitching well beyond that. That was...unpleasant. Anyway, after that it was basically a process of the men gradually draining the blood while M kept busy in the background keeping the floor as clean as possible with the use of the water in the tub. Next, they removed the legs and head, and then they hung the body upside down in the doorway to the kitchen, and from there the butcher began skinning it. Mostly, A and I were able to watch with a detached curiosity, but M clearly hated the whole thing. At one point, she had to sit down and looked close to throwing up. (I can hardly blame her, as she was the one who had to clean up most of the blood, while A and I could - and did - keep our distance. I do have to wonder what the butcher and his assistant thought of the two foreigners - and the only ones present wearing traditional Moroccan clothing - just standing off to the side and staring at the whole procedure.) The entire process took about an hour, at which point M and Y got to work in the kitchen while A and I returned upstairs.

A few hours later, we were called back down to join the family for a (very late) lunch of the ram they'd just killed. I think it might have bothered us more if it weren't so ridiculously tasty. Although it certainly didn't help that H liked to report what part of its body we were being served - mostly heart, if anyone's wondering.

OKAY, EVERYONE SHOULD BE FINE TO START READING AGAIN.

After our meal, we sat back and chatted for a while (mostly in Darija, which I can totally do now! Well, if they talk slowly and are patient and stuff. But it's still really cool!) And then we all went our separate ways to nap and digest. Later that evening, A and I went for a rambling walk that ended up taking us to the end of a rock outcropping at the beach. I really wish we had brought our cameras, because it was one of the clearest days we've seen yet. And then we watched the sunset behind the lighthouse with the waves crashing up against the rocks and it was all so beautiful that it felt too cliched to be real. But it was.

Not a bad way to spend a holiday, if I may say so myself.

Eid mubarak sa3iid!

* To my fellow Arabic nerds: Ok, yes, technically it's "The Holiday of Big." But I'm trying to translate it in a way that doesn't sound ridiculous to non-Arabic nerds. So hush.

Rain, Rain, Stop Being So Loud

2011-11-08T16:30:00.002-06:00

So, J and I have had the last two days off because of a big Muslim holiday here. J will (maybe) write about that soon. Anyway, I’ve promised myself I’m actually going to get a post off with this time, so here goes nothin’.

I don’t remember if it was my last post or not (gosh, I really do need to write more), but one of my recent posts talked about how fun it was to run through the rain. I stand by that. However, the weather on Thursday and Friday took something of a nasty turn, so I guess not all rain is so much fun.

When J and I were leaving our school Thursday afternoon, we decided to take a cab because the weather looked bad. When we got out of the cab, J was almost blown down the hill from the wind that had started up during the ride. I don’t know if it’s just our proximity to the coast that made the wind so bad, or if it was bad all over Rabat, but that was some of the strongest wind that either of us has ever been exposed to.

That was mostly just fine. While the storm started and stopped intermittently between Thursday morning and Sunday afternoon, J and I were snug at home for all of the nasty parts. We live in a house at least as old as our parents’ parents (and probably a good deal older) made out of hard clay or cement, for all I can tell. The walls seem to be half a foot thick, so there’s not really much chance that we were going to be blown away anytime soon. (Which, as you can see in the picture below, isn’t necessarily universally true)

However, there is one quirk of Moroccan architecture which was an inconvenience, if a minor one. In order to keep cool in the long Moroccan summers, our house was built with a large central courtyard open to the sky. This courtyard is somewhat protected from the elements by a raised tin roof that covers the opening while still letting air flow through. That roof keeps out any rain that isn’t blowing sideways.

Problem is, the rain was blowing sideways. A sheet of plastic had been put up just before the storm (because, like I’ve said, we’ve entered the rainy part of the year here), to keep out the rain, but I was concerned the tin roof would blow off. The plastic never had a chance.

So our hallway got wet. No big deal, by itself. We weren’t in the habit of storing anything out there, so other than getting your feet wet to move from room to room, it wasn’t really a problem.

The cold that came with the storm was less fun. I’ve been congested and coughing all weekend, and I have a suspicion that cold and wet feet are why.

Probably the worst aspect was the noise. Like I said, we have a slab of tin between us and the elements. More than enough to protect us from any weather except some leaks from bothering us during the worst of storms, but not much in the way of sound proofing. Really, the noise of the plastic flapping and the tin buckling was probably the most unsettling of all the things we dealt with. It’s a bit difficult to sleep when it sounds like the world is ending in the next room. I’m pretty sure I heard some noises the likes of which I haven’t found since I watched Jurassic Park.

But then the sun came out. It’s still a bit chilly, but all the puddles have dried and my cough is clearing up. A meal of veggie tagine (kind of like a stew with more veggies and less broth) put J back into form. It’s funny how this trip has caused me to miss so many things I’ve never thought about before at the same time it caused me to realize how little I need them. Heating is nice, but a good blanket works too. Sound proofing is helpful, but life goes on without it. I’ll be glad to get back these conveniences when I return, but I’m just fine without them.

That’s my bit of reflecting for this post. In other news, J and I have completed the second of our four week sessions with our school here. We both learned a lot, and look forward to learning more in the coming month.

Our health is has continued to fluctuate. We’re not really sure why exactly we did so much better in Meknes, though the no heating thing certainly isn’t helping. It’s strange, J seems to feel the cold more than I do, but I’m the one who’s had a runny nose and cough for the last four days. I won’t mind when we can go more than a week without one of us getting sick.

J and I had lunch yesterday with our Moroccan family. It was Eid Al Kabir, a Muslim Holiday. I could go into that more, but I think J is planning on doing a post about it. For now, I’ll just say it was the tastiest lamb kabobs I’ve ever had. Also, we got to dress up for the occasion. Hence, our shoes.

One last note. Reading back through my post, I feel that I might have given a false impression about Morocco. The house we’re in does not have heating. Most places in Morocco don’t, but heating isn’t uncommon either. The apartment we stayed in for a week did have heating. What our house does have is satellite TV, as most Moroccan houses do. We constantly hear the father of the family downstairs talking on his cell phone, and the younger daughter is usually on her Nintendo DS (which I didn’t realize they come with cameras now, but they must since she’s always taking pictures with hers). Heating isn’t popular because it isn’t necessary most of the year, and people here have better things to spend their money on. And we live in an old Moroccan house, newer ones don’t have a courtyard that lets in rain. Honestly, I think J and I prefer the rain if it comes with a courtyard. We certainly like our current housing more than the more recently constructed housing we were in last.

Rain and Early Modern North African History

2011-10-30T14:58:00.001-05:00

I took this when I woke up to find it raining one morning.
Generally I'm not a fan of how early I have to get up for
class, but it does have it's perks

So I promised myself that I’d write a substantial post if it killed me this weekend.

So, I got better, and then I stayed up too late reading, and felt like junk at the end of the school week anyway. J has slowly been getting better, but then yesterday her problems started all over again, so healthwise, we’re not doing great.

We’re also a bit disappointed with our interactions with the Moroccan family. We haven’t been up for much, so mostly they’ve been perfunctory. “Hi, how are you?” kind of stuff. Better than nothing, but not significantly better than our relationships with people who run the little snack stalls we frequent.

This lack of real interaction has been harder for J than it has been for me. She’s studying Arabic because she wants to understand how Arabs think, how they live, and who they are. Interacting with people is precisely the reason she wanted to learn Arabic in the first place, and not being able to do that much has been frustrating.

For me, it hasn’t been so bad. I’m less outgoing by nature, and anyway I want to learn Arabic primarily to do stuffy old history things. I hope to be able to converse with Arabs in Arabic, but all I really NEED to do is read. And on that front, it was a fantastic week for me.

J and I were browsing through a bookstore when I found a book called Morocco and Europe, What Happened Between the Fifteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries. Honestly, I think I almost wet myself when I saw it (and that’s not nearly as much of an exaggeration as it ought to be). This might seem strange to some people, but it should only require a little explanation.

I’ve been interested in history since I was young. Back then, it was mostly the battles and armies that caught my attention, but it was still interest. When I got to OU, one of the first things I decided was to go into either history or political science, preferably both. When I met J, my interests shifted a bit. I had always been interested in European history more than anything else, probably because I lacked the basic context required to think about history for any other area. Dating a person studying Arabic will tend to pull a person in that direction, and anyway I’ve always liked history for its own sake.

Right before I decided to take up Arabic myself, I had gotten myself interested in Early Modern European (1500-1750 roughly) history. I could write for a much longer time than I could be interesting in talking about how criminal it is that we don’t know the basic outlines of history for this period, but that’s another post entirely. Suffice it to say, I was hooked on this time period.

Then I spent six weeks in Morocco with J, beginning my study of Arabic. There’s not much better at sparking the interest of a historian than plopping them into the middle of strange country which they immediately fall in love with. So when I got back last year, I did a research paper that combined all of my interests. I wrote almost thirty pages about the relationship between Britain (because my favorite professor specializes in British history, and I’ve taken five classes from him) and Arabic speaking North Africa in the Early Modern period.

So when J and I decided to return to Morocco this fall, I decided one of my top priorities would be finding books about my topic. I finished the paper, but I plan on submitting it to graduate schools, so I want it to be as impressive as possible. If I can incorporate Arabic sources into my research as an undergrad, I become a much more impressive candidate for grad schools.

So, when J and I explored several bookstores and found that most of books were written in French, it was a bit frustrating. French is the language of the intellectual class in Morocco (which was occupied by France for quite some time), so it wasn’t a huge surprise, but it’s still frustrating. It became especially so when we found several books that would make fantastic additions to my paper, except that they were in French. I plan on learning French eventually, as most of the best work about North Africa will be in French, but I won’t learn it in time to include French sources in my paper.

Thus we get the near pants wetting when I read, in Arabic, Morocco and Europe, What Happened Between the Fifteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries. Not only was it cool that I was able to read the title at all, but this book promises to be exactly the kind of thing I had wanted to include in my paper.

So that was cool.

In other news, winter has set in here. That tends to mean temperatures in the seventies when the sun is out, and the forties and fifties when it isn’t. It also means a decent amount of rain.

The rain is kind of a switch. J and I have spent most of the last couple years in our college town in the States, which due to some weird quirk of elevation, only rarely gets real rain. What it does get plenty of is drizzle, fog, and general ickiness.

So having it raining for two days straight has been odd. We’re talking drench you in seconds kind of stuff. I can probably count the number of times our town has had that kind of rain during the day on my hands. It’s a nice change. It reminds me of when I was younger and used to play in the rain. For just a few moments (before I remembered I was wearing a book bag with lots of stuff in it), the rain was just this friendly presence that it was fun to run through. I don’t think adults get enough of that kind of thing. At least, I haven’t in the past few years.

That’s the news. I’d say I’m going to try to post more regularly, but that never seems to lead anywhere good. Until next time…

***************************************************

J’s hoping to put up some posts soon. We’ll see if it actually happens, but that’s the plan.

Pink Eye, Chocolate, and a Birthday!

2011-10-14T14:09:00.000-05:00

So, you may or may not have noticed, but J and I haven’t posted for a little while. At least for me, I can assure you it isn’t because I stopped liking the sound of my own voice (in my head, as I type this).

Rather, class is keeping us on a punishing schedule. Well, the combination of class and distance anyway. You see, while J and I are thrilled to be settled in with our Moroccan family, the location isn’t as good as it might be. A trip to the grocery store is a thirty minute walk, which isn’t bad by itself. The real problem is that the trip to school involves thirty to forty minutes of walking each way. That takes a toll after a while.

Why we’re getting a bit run down can be better illustrated by running through our schedule. Our day starts at six or six-thirty (depending on whether we had shouldered through all our homework the night before). We leave to go to the taxi station at about seven-twenty, and arrive at eight-twenty (at least half of that time is on foot, with our books). At eight-thirty, classes start. Imagine the next four hours being one long meeting that’s conducted in a foreign language, and you’ll have some idea of the mental drain it entails (and given how poor the chairs are, a physical drain as well).

We eat at the school, and after lunch we’ve started taking some optional tutoring. So we’re not back until three-thirty at the earliest, and by then we need to crash for a bit. After crashing, there’s a decent chance we need to run out to the grocery store or the pharmacy (more on that later). Homework hasn’t been too bad for J, but it takes me probably three hours a night, so between supper and other necessary breaks (necessary to keep my head from exploding), that’s my day.

The bright side is that class has picked up in a big way. Most of the problems I was having last month have been resolved and I’m progressing quickly. So basically I’m tired, but it’s worth it. I’m hoping to use this weekend to get ahead (I know my homework for the next three weeks), so hopefully next week I’ll be able to post more regularly.

In tragic news, J’s kindle busted about a week ago. I hadn’t realized how fully we relied on them until we started sharing the remaining one. They really are incredible little machines. I don’t think I ever posted about this, but when J and I were in transit between Morocco and Turkey, we used the 3G on them to send our parents regular updates. It’s so weird to think that ten years ago I had barely used the internet, and now I have access to it on this little slab of plastic.

Don’t get me wrong, I dream of library with book covered walls (and a fireplace) when I get older, but the kindle is just too useful not to love. I can get books more cheaply (many for free), search them by keyword, and take my entire library with me when I travel. J’s kindle breaking has forced me to realize that we both use them several times a day every day.

Speaking of convenient things (for lack of a better transition), I really like Moroccan medicine. Yesterday I woke up with one eye all pink and puffy looking. When it didn’t get better by lunch, I went to a pharmacy five minutes from our residence, pointed to my eye, and a small Moroccan man sat me down, used a dropper on my eye, and gave me some more medicine for about five dollars. As I write this, my eye is still a bit red, but it will probably be all better by tomorrow.

This is the third time J or I have had to use a pharmacy here. The other two times (in two different pharmacies) have been similarly efficient and cheap (and effective). And that’s just pretty cool.

Finally, I wanted to wish Grandma S a happy birthday from both J and I. In her honor, tonight we will celebrate the occasion with a piece of Pralinutta bread. Similar to Nutella, this chocolate/hazelnut spread lists sugar as its first ingredient, and will have to do in the absence of cake. We love you, Grandma!

The WWE, Oprah, and People

2011-10-08T14:03:00.004-05:00

So J and I definitely made the right decision to move in with the family. And not just because we can watch the sun set over the Atlantic, either.

No, right now I’m glad we moved in with the family because of the family. Not because they’re Moroccan (though that’s cool, too), but because they’re them.

Last weekend they sent up a few plates with some tea and some food (which was fantastic, by the way). When we took the plates back down, we decided to try and chat with them a bit. The whole point of moving in with the family was so that we wouldn’t create an American bubble around ourselves. We wanted to genuinely get to know some Moroccan people, and in order to do that we decided not to be the tenants that never leave their rooms.

So we went downstairs, and for the next thirty minutes, we laughed our butts off.

For starters, the dad is hilarious, and he’s hilarious in a way that crosses language barriers. Which is a good thing, since at any given time any one of four languages might be in use. Both the dad (H) and the mom (M) speak excellent Darija (Moroccan Arabic), Fus-ha (Classical Arabic), and French. They also have some English (It sounds like H served some time in the Moroccan military in the Gulf with Americans), but that’s a bit shakier. Meanwhile, J has good French and English, some Darija (way more than she should after a month of study), and some Fus-ha. I have English, a bit of Fus-ha, and some scraps of Darija and French that I’ve picked up from J.

So with that kind of language situation, just trying to figure out what’s being said can send the whole group of us into fits of laughter.

Anyway, we’re down there talking with H and M, with the younger daughter (Y) sitting near. Y is very shy. She’ll give us a both a big smile when we see her, but after a few days in the house, we couldn’t remember if she’d said more than a few words to both of us put together.

Anyway, we’re sitting there talking, I think about the television that was on in the background, when H just starts exclaiming, “John Seena! You know John Seena?” In the back of my head, I’m thinking, “Isn’t that the wrestling guy? But no, that can’t be right.”

But it was right. In no time, Y had jumped up from the couch and was yelling, “John Seena!” right along with her dad. It turns out that H and Y (an eight year old girl) love watching WWE wrestling together.

Speaking of stuff you don't expect to see in Morocco...

I have to admit, I hadn’t seen that one coming.

It then came out that M liked watching the Oprah Show, which is less surprising, but still.

It just goes to show that putting people into boxes is silly. I have described the people we’re living with as “a Moroccan family,” and I had certain preconceptions about what that meant. Some of those preconceptions might still be true, but I have to admit that others have been smashed like a folding chair over the back of a large sweating man.

It just goes to show you. Generalizations might be accurate, or even helpful, but if you think generalizations will really help you much with a particular person, you’re likely to be surprised (generally speaking). I learned that I was living with two WWE fans after two days with this family. I’m sure I’ve barely scraped the surface of who they really are.

Our New Digs

2011-10-02T10:35:00.001-05:00

J and I, finally, are set somewhere to stay. At least, we hope we are. Right now, we’re renting the entire second floor of a Moroccan family's house. The house is in the Oudaya of Rabat, a fortress from the olden days where the populace would hide out if Rabat was invaded. As our hosts said, “Rabat is the capital of Morocco, and Oudaya is the capital of Rabat.

Anyway, it’s a great set up. We have a goodish sized bedroom, a smaller bedroom, a large living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. The family (husband, wife, and two daughters) lives downstairs. The whole thing is set up in the traditional Moroccan way, with rooms on all floors opening into a central courtyard that keeps the whole thing cooler in the summer. Above us is a rooftop terrace for hanging laundry out to dry, though I suppose it could be used for watching the sun rise over Rabat and set over the Atlantic, if a person was so inclined.

We're pleased to be away from our last apartment for several reasons. First, it was loud. We were on the second story, and there was a salon on the first one that liked to blast music all day. The stairs smelled like smoke. It seems like many of the other occupants were about our age, and people in their early twenties are not a quiet age group when you stick a bunch of them together.

Another reason we made the move was the price. Even without all the noise, our one room studio had no place for laundry. We had a better kitchen set up in our dorms at OU. And our beds (yes, two twins) had some of the worst mattresses we've ever used. It was fine, but it wasn't a four room place. For the price we were paying for it, that just wasn't going to work. Right now, with this family, we're looking at paying half as much in rent as we would at the studio.

Then there's the location. We are farther away from the school we're attending, but we're also across the street from the medina. That's the older section of the city, the part that's been inhabited for hundreds of years. Everything is squeezed into these narrow streets. During the day, most of the medina becomes a market place or crafts shop. In a hundred yard stretch, you'll probably have a

leather shop, a traditional Moroccan shoe shop, a tennis shoe shop, a juice shop, a rug shop, a shop for traditional Moroccan clothes, a shop for t-shirts clothes, and a shop for touristy knick knacks. Repeat that a hundred times, toss in the odd shop for everything else, and you've got the medina.

This is our part of Rabat. The medina has more character. There's more to do there. And, importantly for us, you're a lot less isolated there. In newer parts of Rabat, you might end up walking for a while if you wanted a cheap bottle of water, a loaf of bread, or any other item. That will never be the case in the medina.

So, we have the medina on one side. On the other is the ocean. We're maybe a five minute walk from the beach here, a beach which isn't really that crowded this time of year. I don't think I need to explain why that's cool.

Ideally, we'll be here until about May. That'll be a nice change for us. We haven't stayed in the same place for much more than two weeks since August, and our luggage is starting to show the wear.

This is basically our front porch.

2011-09-28T12:59:00.000-05:00

Roof of the Mohammad V Mausoleum,
where I went for my excursion.

So, right now J and I are at a fantastic restaurant with Wifi. We’re only getting some juice, because we don’t need a meal, but it’s still really tasty.

There’s quite a bit to catch you up on. Both of us have been sick. You might actually get a rant out of me about the Arabic language (I usually leave that up to J). I went on an excursion. I went to a meeting of the Islamic Studies Club. We may be switching apartments again this weekend. Oh, and yesterday we informed our program (from whom we’re renting our current apartment) that a light bulb had gone out, and a couple of workmen showed up and replaced the entire light fixture.

So it’s been an odd week so far.

Sickness

Both of us have been suffering from some sort of weird stomach bug. Basically, when we eat or drink something, there’s about a fifty-fifty chance that our stomachs will flip out and start hurting really badly. Sometimes it lasts for half an hour, other times, it will last all morning. It’s certainly

Our current apartment.

taken the wind out of our sails. We’ve gotten some medicine for it with mixed results. Also, vinegar seems to help me, though J hasn’t really tried it. We seem to be getting better, but there’s definitely some real hesitation before I eat or drink anything substantial.

I got sick first, and the medicine seems to be a bit less helpful for me than it is for J. This illness is a first for us. We’ve gotten a bit puny before from being so worn out, but this sickness is the first real Morocco caused illness that either of us has had. And that only came after a full two months in Morocco without any real problems (six weeks last summer, two weeks this trip). You can chalk it up to luck, but we prefer to chalk it up to a smart approach to travelling. Start out with a few sips of water a day when you enter a country and slowly wean yourself off of bottled water as you go. If you think you might be getting sick, go back to the bottled stuff. Overloading your immune system from the get go usually doesn’t go well, but trying to isolate yourself completely won’t work either.

Off in the distance, Oudaya,
where we hope to be living soon.

Switching Apartments

So, I said last week I was looking forward to getting settled somewhere, and I still am. Actually J and I had been anticipating that we might switch apartments at least once after we moved into the school apartments. Our current apartment is fine, but it’s needlessly expensive, and it just so happens that one of J’s classmates is a Frenchman, is a longtime resident of Morocco, and has several different friends who are trying to rent apartments with a view of the ocean.

So, hopefully we’ll be settled for good by Saturday.

Light Fixtures

This is not our old light fixture, but it
gives you a good idea of what it
looked like.

So, J and I have had some issues with our current apartment. We’ll go into that more later, though. For now, it’s enough to say that when our light bulb burned out when we returned from class yesterday, we were thoroughly frustrated.

The light in the apartment wasn’t great to begin with, but this would prevent us from being able to study or read, and doing anything else would have given us headaches. We had to call our program (from this same [noisy] internet café) twice before anybody finally showed up (just before the sun went down and we were left in the dark).

They came in as we were walking out. We got dinner, and expected to find them gone upon our return. They were not. We walked into our apartment to find a tool box next to the door and a new light fixture hanging from our ceiling.

This is our new light fixture.
Much nicer and brighter.

Not wanting to be in the way, we beat a hasty, confused retreat and wandered around a bit. Twenty minutes later when my stomach demanded we be done walking, they were still there. I have no idea why they installed a new light fixture, but apparently it was a complicated process.

Tucking ourselves into the couch, which seemed as out of the way as our apartment would allow, we were present when a spark lit up the room like a lightning strike.

“No problem?” one of them said to the other (in Arabic, which we both understood, go us!). “Problem,” the other replied. After another fifteen minutes, they had cleaned everything up and gone, leaving a substantially better lit apartment behind them.

Just another of the mysteries of Morocco…

More cats!!!

A Short Update

2011-09-27T13:26:00.000-05:00

J and I, as people seem to have noticed, haven't been posting. Believe it or not, stuff keeps happening even when it doesn't show up on the blog. Right now, we're moved into our new apartment and we're both a little sick.

That's a very short version of what's been going on, and it's being posted from an internet cafe here. We hope to be posting more detailed accounts of our lives soon, now that we know there's a cafe less than a block from our apartment. Stay tuned for more.

Moving On Up

2011-09-24T16:16:00.000-05:00

Hey everyone!

J and I, as previously mentioned, are going to be moving into our new apartment tomorrow. We neglected to say, however, that we won't be posting as regularly for a little bit. Our new apartment, while we're sure it's very nice, doesn't have internet. So while we will be posting, we probably won't be posting quite as much. We'll see. Anyway, if you don't hear from us for a few days, we didn't drop off the face of the earth.

We'll write again soon (hopefully) with pictures of our new place.

A Longer Update

2011-09-22T15:02:00.000-05:00

I have a test tomorrow, which actually means more time for the blog, as silly as that might seem. That means you get a longer update on our situation.

J is doing better, sort of. She stayed home from school today for the first time, and that's sad. However, yesterday we went to the pharmacy to get her some medicine, and between that and the rest she got today, she is doing better. Besides, staying home today means she's less likely to stay home tomorrow. Since they serve Couscous (our favorite dish) on Fridays, this was an important consideration. We have our priorities.

Speaking of the pharmacy, J got three items of medicine: cough drops, an Airborne type supplement, and some regular cough medicine. She got all of this for about ten dollars. Have I mentioned that we like the prices here?

*****

In other news, we're supposed to be moved into our apartment by Monday. I'm a little afraid to write about how excited I am, as you might understand. I am also not going to rehash all of the travelling we've done, again.

I am going to try to explain why we keep looking forward to settling in, and why we keep complaining when we find out that we're moving again. It might surprise you to hear it, but J and I don't really like to travel.

Seriously, we don't. We didn't sleep on four different continents (okay, so I'll do a little rehashing) within our first month of marriage because we wanted to see as many hotel rooms as possible. We did it because it's what we thought we had to do to get to the place we want to be in life. If it weren't for that, we never would have left.

Travelling, for us, is exhausting, frustrating, and expensive. It's a bunch of waiting around punctuated by frantic worry made all the more awful by the necessity of having to babysit (and transport) hundreds of pounds of luggage most of the time. That's not our idea of a good time.

On the other hand, we love being places. We're really rather boring, in that respect. Here in Morocco, our idea of a good time is strolling through the souq (market place), digging through a Moroccan bookstore, or reading through a good book in some idealic location, preferably on a balcony. That's part of why we wanted to be abroad for so long this time around. We don't mind seeing strange things, but the real attraction is making the strange things familar. The parts of Morocco that we like, we like because we think they're good, and not because they're different.

This is a picture of one of the local parks from across
the street.

We didn't come to Morocco so we could visit twenty different sites, race camels, or meet an exotic stranger (though J insists that I either let her adopt a Moroccan child or she'll find a way to make one on her own, whatever that means). We came here because (most importantly) we want to learn Arabic, we want to understand this part of the world, and we like quietly sipping strong mint tea with our simple but delicious breakfast.

Moving around casts a pall on all that. Living out of a suitcase is a constant reminder, "You won't be here long. Don't get comfortable, you'll be gone soon." Reading a book is less satisfying in those conditions. In many ways, I don't really understand the attraction of a weeklong vacation. I understand the attraction of a weeklong break, but not a weeklong vacation. If you don't have time to unpack, I don't see the point in packing in the first place. It reminds me of a quote from my favorite author, "Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant." If I can't spend the rest of my life doing something, if it won't make me happy at least that short speck of time, it isn't enough.

So you see, J and I are both just domestic, boring people. We just happen to prefer being domestic and boring in North Africa to being domestic and boring in the States. It might be an odd preference, but it's ours, and having a home to be domestic in for more than a month is wonderful.

So we'll keep you up to date on the apartment.

And besides, we have all the comforts of home right here in Rabat

Catchy Title for a Blog Post

2011-09-20T16:55:00.000-05:00

I've still got homework to do, so I'll have to make this quick.

J has had a bit of a cold and a cough since last week. It's no fun at all, but so far she hasn't had to miss class because of it.

Other than that, class work is taking up most of our time. A necessary sacrifice. My Arabic has already improved tremendously, and I'm not covering half the material J is. That's mostly alright, as I doubt I pick up vocabulary nearly as quickly as J. Still, sometimes my class moves a bit too slowly for my taste.

We did some wandering over the weekend. I think J already posted some of the pictures. I'll be putting up more soon as well. In the meantime, I have some newer pictures to show you.

You might know (but probably not, if you aren't our parents), but the program offers lots of extra activities and excursions each week. Some are in the morning (when we have class) and some are in the afternoon (when other people have class). J hasn't gotten to go on any yet, but I went to a museum last week (without my camera), and today I when to the Exotic Garden of Sale (across the river from Rabat). The pictures along the side are from the garden.

Anyway, we're keeping busy. Hopefully one of these days I'll manage to get my homework done quickly enough to do a real post.

Arabic: Classical vs. Colloquial, Part I

2011-09-17T13:46:00.000-05:00

Note: This post is very long. So long, in fact, that there's more coming - I had to break it up into a few parts. It's mainly focused on something that I (and, I think, some of you) find fascinating, but many of you probably just aren't interested in. I'd encourage you to at least skim this first post, as it will make a lot of our other entries make more sense. Beyond that, though, you have my full permission to skip it. I won't be offended!

Although I've known since high school that I wanted to study Arabic, I had no idea just what an undertaking it would be. Sure, I'd realized that it's widely considered one of the world's most difficult languages for English-speakers to learn, but I've always had a knack for languages, I love learning them, and I've been studying them for as long as I could remember. I knew it would be a challenge, but it was one that I welcomed.

The fact that it uses a completely different alphabet didn't really concern me. I'd taught myself the sign language alphabet when I was 8 and, although I've since forgotten it, my dad had taught me the Greek alphabet at about the same time. I knew that it would be challenging at first but would quickly become second nature - which it has.

All the strange sounds in the Arabic language didn't particularly worry me, either. They were challenging but fun, and I'd spent enough time studying singing to know how to analyze sounds, figure out how they were made, and, in time, be able to closely imitate them.

I welcomed the fact that the language was based on an entirely different logical structure than English. I guess I'm enough like my (philosophy-studying) brother that paradigm shifts make me happy: I like being confronted with the fact that what I've always accepted unquestioningly is not necessarily "normal," nor is it the only possible approach. Some days it makes my head hurt, but some of my favorite moments in studying foreign languages come when I suddenly realize that, gee, the Latin/Greek-root system isn't the only way to go! Nouns and adjectives can actually be really fluid concepts! It can be totally logical for the numbers 11-99 to be followed by singular nouns, while the numbers 3-10 are followed by plural nouns of the opposite gender of the numbers themselves, and for non-human plural nouns to be treated as though they were feminine singular!*

Anyway, I welcomed all of those challenges, both the expected and the unexpected, in studying Arabic. For me, the ultimate purpose of studying a language is being able to communicate with the people who speak it (and on their terms), but I still thrive on the process of getting there. What really got to me was the realization that, for my purposes, what I was pouring myself into at school was practically useless.

As anyone who has taken high school Spanish and then tried to go to Mexico already knows, studying a language in school is very different from actually being able to use it in the real world. Much of that is due to problems with how we teach foreign languages in the U.S., but that's another story entirely. Anyway, I've studied (and at least tried to use in the real world) Spanish, French, Turkish, and American sign language as well as Arabic, so I'm quite aware of that phenomenon. The issue with Arabic, though, goes way beyond issues like "they speak too fast" or "they use lots of slang."

Basically (and this is definitely an over-simplification), the Arab world has been politically and socially fractured for quite a long time. It has been divided into more than 20 countries that often have poor relations with each other, and many of those nations have experienced long periods of European colonialization. Over time, these different countries have seen some very significant shifts in the way they speak Arabic, and obviously those shifts have been different in different parts of the Arab world.

Today, the Arabic language is typically viewed as having a number (at least 4, depending on who you ask) of different dialect families. If they are divided into 4 groups, they would be Maghribi (covering northwestern Africa), Masri (mostly Egypt) Shamsi (Syria and the surrounding countries) and Khaliji (the Gulf states.) You could, however, keep dividing the dialects almost indefinitely - there are often significant differences between, say, the Arabic dialect spoken in Rabat and the one spoken in Fes, just a few hours away.

Anyway, these "dialects" really only all fit under the heading "Arabic" for political, religious, and sociological reasons. In reality, it is often very difficult, if not outright impossible, for Arabs from one region to understand Arabs from another. Just to give you an idea, here's how to say a few basic phrases (randomly chosen) in Maghribi, Masri, and Shamsi (I don't know any Khaliji, so I have to skip that one):

Phrase	Maghribi	Masri	Shamsi
I am American	Ana merikani	Ana amriki	Ana amerki
How are you?	La bas?	Izzayak?	Kiifak?
[Response]	La bas	Kuwayyis	Ana mniH
Excuse me, sir	smH laya, as-sidi	La mu'akhaza, efendim	3afwan, ya akh
How much is this?	B-shHal had?	Bi-kam da?	B-ad-dish hada?
My husband	rajli	goozi	jozi

As you can see, in many cases the expressions have absolutely nothing in common. In no case are they exactly the same. So...which dialect did I study in school?

Well, none of them. See, there's a sort of "standardized" Arabic called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), or (in Arabic) Fusha. It's actually much closer to the language of the Qur'an than to any modern dialect, and while theoretically it's the dialect that you're supposed to be able to use anywhere in the Arab world, the reality is much more complicated than that for a number of reasons:

1) Fusha is essentially an artificial language (it's not the native language of any country) and its grammar rules are extremely complex (much more so than the grammar rules for any of the modern dialects.)

2) Although students throughout the Arab world are supposed to learn Fusha in school, educational attainment in a lot of these countries is low enough that many students never really master it.

3) Even for those who do, in my experience it's a lot like students who master advanced algebra in high school: they might be really good at it at the time, but it doesn't take long for them to forget almost everything.

4) Some people try to argue that Fusha must be widely understood because it's the written languages (the modern dialects are almost never put to paper) and the language of newscasts, formal speeches, and the like. While that's true, illiteracy rates are alarmingly high in many (although certainly not all) parts of the Arab world (more on that in an upcoming post) and many people never listen to TV and radio shows where Fusha is spoken. Indeed, just the other day I heard a Moroccan man rather sadly joking that when the king speaks to his people [in Fusha] no one understands what he's telling them.

5) Even for those who do read and listen to Fusha, they rarely hear it enough to be able to understand it when Americans come in and try to speak it with their broken grammar and heavy accents. To get some idea of the effect, try to imagine a Chinese man approaching you on the street and trying to speak to you in (Chinese-accented) Chaucer English. Even if you were a English literature scholar, you'd have quite some trouble understanding him.

6) Even when they can understand you, it's very difficult for them to respond in Fusha. After all, Arabs are rarely expected to use the language actively, and there's a big difference between understanding Fusha when someone else speaks it, and being able to speak it yourself (to return to the Chinese man, even if you could understand what he said, could you respond in kind?)

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Almost anyone who has exclusively studied Fusha and then tried to interact with native Arabic speakers (and I've talked to many, many of these people) will share similar stories: that people didn't even realize they were speaking Arabic, that they were outright laughed at, that (at best) they were understood but responded to in a dialect that they couldn't follow at all.

Oh, by the way, remember that chart up above comparing a few phrases in the various Arab dialects? Here's that same chart, with Fusha thrown in:

Phrase	Maghribi	Masri	Shamsi	Fusha
I am American	Ana merikani	Ana amriki	Ana amerki	Ana amrikiyy
How are you?	La bas?	Izzayak?	Kiifak?	Kayf al-Haal?
[Response]	La bas	Kuwayyis	Ana mniH	Ana jayyid
Excuse me, sir	smH laya, as-sidi	La mu'akhaza, efendim	3afwan, ya akh	ismaH lii, ya sa'iidii
How much is this?	B-shHal had?	Bi-kam da?	B-ad-dish hada?	Bi-kam hatha?
My husband	rajli	goozi	joozi	zawji

While you can pick out a few similarities here and there, it's certainly not enough to successfully communicate with. And while I have met the occasional Moroccan (including the owner of our riad) who both understands and speaks excellent Fusha, it's very unusual. I've met far more people here who speak excellent English.

That's not to say that Fusha is worthless. Many Arabs passionately defend the value of Fusha, and their reasons resonate with me. I'll talk more about that in a later post, but briefly, Fusha is - at least theoretically - one of the strongest bonds besides Islam between Arabs of different nations. In addition, because of its similarities to the classical Arabic that the Quran is written in, knowing Fusha brings Muslims much closer to being able to understand the Quran.** As the written language, Fusha is also incredibly valuable to anyone from academic scholars (as A wants to be) to people who simply want to understand their daily Arabic newspaper.

So, it definitely has its value and I understand why schools teach it. Certainly, I want to be able to read and write Arabic as well as speak it. That being said, it can be incredibly frustrating to devote massive amounts of time over the course of four years (I started in my senior year in high school) to a language, often involving extremely complex and nuanced grammar points, all the while knowing that none of this will allow me to have even the simplest of conversations on the street or in a taxi anywhere in the Arab world.

I think the cat is trying to move that jar with her mind. And she might just pull it off.
Oh, right - I'm supposed to be talking about Arabic...

Anyway, that's why, when I'm here, I'm studying the local Arabic dialect (called Darija.) It's also why I'm having to start at the very beginning, even though my Fusha is actually quite respectable. A is, of course, continuing his Fusha studies because he's mainly interested in Arabic for academic purposes (and besides, he's got a free live-in translator!) Sadly, most people (even many Moroccans) are pretty dismissive of Darija because it's one of the least widely understood Arabic dialects, but it just happens to be the dialect of one of my favorite places in the world, so I can't say that I mind too much.

*Ok, I'm lying about that last bit. Numbers really do work that way in Arabic (in fact, it gets even more complicated than that), but I don't think I'll ever be able to accept it as logical.

** While most Muslims have no problem with the Quran being translated into other languages, at that point it is no longer considered the Holy Quran. It is, rather, seen as a commentary on the original book. Only the Arabic version is considered the "true" version. Given the incredible richness of the Arabic language and how much of it is necessarily lost in translation, I have to say that I think they have a point.

Our First Week

2011-09-17T11:58:00.001-05:00

Well, A and I have successfully completed our first week of classes, and we're both extremely excited about the program here. Now that we're actually starting to settle into a routine, I can tell you that our average morning goes something like this:

We get up (reluctantly) at about 6:30 in the morning, get dressed, and head upstairs where the man who runs our riad is preparing us a delicious breakfast of bread, jam, and mint tea laced with diabetes. Now that he knows we're studying Arabic, he loves talking to us in that language and teaching us occasional new words and phrases. Since the caffeine hasn't really kicked in yet, it's all we can do to keep up. When we finish eating, we head off to class.

It's about a 45-minute trip to the school, but after Ankara that feels like nothing. For those who are interested, the trip goes something like this: We leave our riad at about 7:30 and walk for about 10 minutes through the narrow, winding streets. There are no cars that deep in the medina, but motorcycles and bikes are both very popular and a little terrifying when they come barreling down the street behind you. That early in the morning, only a few people are out yet, and they all seem very surprised to see a pair of Americans out for a walk. Easily outnumbering the people are the stray cats, which seem to be everywhere. A keeps complaining that he hates not being allowed to pet them.

To be fair, they are really stinking cute.

Much of the medina is surrounded by a centuries-old wall that has numerous keyhole-shaped gates. We leave through one of them and are immediately plunged into the "modern" part of Rabat, complete with skyscrapers, a metro, multi-lane highways, and palm trees. I love the palm trees.

To get to the school, we could take a bus, a "petite taxi" (which runs like your average U.S. taxi), or a "grand taxi." We've done all three, but we think that the grand taxi offers the best combination of speed and affordability. To take one, we walk about 5 minutes to the nearest grand taxi station, which is essentially a parking lot with dozens of gray Mercedes Benzes. The are a number of drivers (all male) standing around waiting to make their next trip. We only need to say one word, "Souissi" (the neighborhood our school is in) and, after a bit of shouting back and forth, we're pointed in the general direction of a car headed that way. It usually takes asking a few more times before we're able to make it to our exact car and driver, but we always do in the end. Once 7 people are inside (the driver, two passengers up front with him, and four in the back) we take off. Somehow, that never takes more than a few minutes, and often only takes a few seconds, even when we seem to be the only ones looking for a taxi. It's really one of this country's great mysteries.

The seating is, of course, extremely cramped, but luckily it's a short drive. Plus, Moroccan men are generally chivalrous enough to have women sit by women whenever possible and, when it isn't, not to try anything "unseemly." The only time I have ever seen a Moroccan man acting inappropriately in a taxi (using the cramped space as an excuse to put his arm around a woman), the taxi driver stopped the car and ordered him to get out.

After a 10-15 minute drive, the driver stops to let us out. We're almost always let out a little before the spot he's "supposed" to take us, but getting to that spot takes some complicated - and time-consuming - traffic maneuvering that most drivers just don't want to do. Since we're paying about $0.60 each for the ride, we really aren't too picky about the customer service.

The 15 or so minute walk to our school couldn't be more different from the medina we just left. Souissi is one of the ritziest parts of Rabat, and for most of the walk there's a gorgeous park to our left and a row of embassies, as well as the occasional mansion, to our right. Before long, we arrive at our school which, let's just say, looks like it belongs in the area.

Because I'm studying the colloquial Moroccan dialect I was automatically placed in the beginning level. (I'll be talking about the dialect versus "traditional" Arabic in an upcoming post. For now, just let me say that the two are very, very, different.) I only have three other classmates: a 26-year-old man from Seattle who had, like me, studied some traditional Arabic before coming here; a 52-year-old French man who lives in Marrakesh but came here to learn to speak the dialect; and a 23-year-old female Fullbright scholar who is doing a research project with the U.S. Embassy here in Rabat.

The teacher is a very sweet Moroccan woman who speaks adequate English and excellent French. So, since all of us (except the student from Seattle) also speak French, we probably use English and French in equal proportions. While I feel badly for him sometimes, he doesn't seem particularly bothered by it and one of us always tries to translate for him. Personally, of course, I love it - it's like getting two languages for the price of one, especially because the teacher usually switches to French for more complex issues that she can't quite convey in English.

Anyway, my class moves very quickly, which is great by me. All of us have had a fair bit of exposure to Arabic, either through studying the "classical" language (me and the guy from Seattle) or from living extensively in Morocco (the other two.) Even so, the class is moving fast enough that we all have to really be on the ball to keep up. Just in the five days of class so far, we've learned:

Basic introductory conversations (how to introduce ourselves, talk about our age, where we're from, why we're in Morocco, etc.)
Days, months, and seasons
Question words
How to talk about our families
How to talk about the weather
How to talk about the time (much more complicated than you'd think)
How to talk about our daily routines
How to count to 999,999,999,999
How to go shopping (including the names of lots of common items, how to talk about price, how to bargain, etc.)
How to order food from a restaurant (including lots of food vocab)
About 50 verbs (including many irregular verbs) and how to conjugate them in the past, present, and future tenses
About 30 adjectives (including their masculine, feminine, and plural forms)
Negation of verbs and adjectives
Demonstrative adjectives and pronouns (this, that, these, those)
Possessive pronouns
The imperative (the verb form that gives commands, like "Eat" or "Go away!")
Lots of general expressions, including many phrases so that we can conduct class in Arabic as much as possible (phrases like "How do you say....in Arabic" or "What does...mean," or "I don't understand...")

And that's the short list. So, again, it is a VERY intensive class. I absolutely love it, though, and the other students seem to appreciate it but also get frustrated sometimes (although much of what we're covering is completely new to me, the fact that I've studied "traditional" Arabic more than anyone else in there does often give me an edge.) Already, I'm being able to carry out basic conversations in Arabic with real, live Moroccans, which is incredibly exciting. The only sad thing is that, this being an embassy town, people in Rabat aren't nearly as impressed with seeing a foreigner who can speak a bit of their dialect as the people in, say, Meknes (the city we were in last summer) would be. So, I don't get quite the ego boost that I'd like...oh well. At this rate, I'll be debating 17th-century politics by the time this program is up. That'll show 'em!

My Arabic Class

2011-09-17T07:26:00.000-05:00

Well, the weekend is finally here, which means you are all owed a post about what I did during the week.

On Monday, I took the placement test. For Arabic, almost any place that instructs in English will use one textbook series, and in that series there are three books: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. The program J and I are in now divides each book into three seperate classes: I, II, and III.

Last semester I covered the first three chapters of the Intermediate, but that ended in May. What with getting married, moving to a different continent, and then moving again, I have to say that my Arabic has suffered.

These are a few of the knicknacks placed around the school
we're attending.

So we were nervous that I wouldn't be placed high enough. In many ways, I probably didn't go into the test deserving to be placed at Intermediate I or II. So I was very nervous when I ended up in a room with six other people who were also taking placement tests.

Fortunately, God is good, and students everywhere are uniformly ill prepared. After a test and a discussion group with the other students being placed, I ended up in Intermediate II. While all of the other (three) people in my class seem to have some Arabic skills which I don't have, they also all seem to have some areas where they need to be whipped into shape.

Class, as you might remember, is divided into two parts. Two hours before the tea break, and an hour and a half after it. Our teacher, H, never explained the format of the class, but as nearly as I can tell, the first half is dedicated to discussion and the second half is dedicated to covering material in the textbook.

That sounds straightforward, right? Well, if so, I'm not doing a good job of explaining how class actually goes. In the middle of the discussion, H might start giving a long explanation of a grammar rule. While covering material from the book, he might ask us what we think about what we're reading.

This little courtyard is one of the first things you see when
you walk into our school.

So, for example, on Friday we talked (in Arabic) about the role of the media in the Arab Spring. This sounds impressive, and I'm hoping in a month or two it will be, but for now it means taking turns at expressing relatively simple ideas to the other people in the class. So for instance, H (who often seems to play the devil's advocate in these discussions), said that he thought the media was a negative influence because they often spread false information. I responded, "The true information which is published is more important than the false information." That sounds good until you take into account how long it took me (a minute or two at least) to stumble that out.

Still, I'm not really frustrated. As someone interested in academia, I've grown accustomed to the idea that success only comes after you have payed your dues (five years of dues for undergrad, six years of dues to get the PhD...). My Arabic is rusty now, but that rust is already starting to be shaken off, and if I have twenty hours of Arabic a week for several months, the conversations in my classes will get much more fluid and interesting.

And that's why I'm doing all this. J loves the process of learning a language and the thrill of success (among other things, to be sure). There's some of that for me, but really it's about opening the doors and windows on the minds of other people. What did Moroccan diplomats think about four hundred years ago? What do Moroccan scholars think today? I'm thrilled that soon I hope to be able to converse fluidly in Arabic, but really the thing that makes me happiest about it is being able to converse fluidly.

A Short Update

2011-09-15T12:15:00.000-05:00

J and I had been hoping to post a bit more regularly than we have been. Personallly, I am still hoping for that. But for the present moment, it looks like we'll mostly be getting people caught up over the weekend. This post should help you understand why:

Turtles! I love the souq here.

What My Day Looks Like:

6:30- Wake up and go through morning ablutions.

7:00- Eat Breakfast (compliments of our hotel). Includes fresh sqeezed orange juice (seriously, he makes it in the other room), tea (fantastic!), and peach or strawberry jelly on fresh bread (Last two mornings, it was still warm).

7:40- Leave for school in a grand taxi (Mercedes stuffed with six passengers and a driver).

8:00- Arrive at our stop. Begin Walking.
8:20- Arrive at our school.
8:30- Class begins.
10:30- Much needed break (with more fantastic tea provided by the school).
11:00- Class resumes.
12:30- Class ends. J and I share lunch of tagine and bread at the school.
13:00- (Weird system, isn't it) Leave from school.
13:40- Arrive back at hotel. Study.

15:00- Run errands. Bring back food, water. Look fruitlessly (so far) for a place to exchange Turkish Lira for Moroccan Dirham.

17:00- Return to hotel. Shower Immediately

17:15- Begin studying. Occassional blogging.

18:00- Supper of health shakes and bread (made that day).

18:30- Go to one of the two churches in Rabat (optional).

20:00- Return to hotel. Resume studying.

21:00- Much needed downtime.

22:30- Lose consciousness in order to repeat the process.

As you can see, there isn't a lot of time in there for blogging. I'm hoping that as my Arabic improves (and it will, I've hardly touched it all summer, and I'm paying the price now) more time will be freed up for other endeavors.

In the meantime, classes are still going very well, and we're both learning a great deal. I'll write in more detail on that over the weekend.

Happy Anniversary to Us

2011-09-13T11:06:00.001-05:00

This is a view from our airplane into Morocco.

So I'm in the middle of writing a post about our first few days of class (spoiler, they're going really well). In the meantime, I couldn't let the day pass without recognizing the fact that J made the dumbest decision of her life exactly one month ago. I'm a nerd, and sometimes numbers really entertain me, so here's some numbers about our first month of wedlock:

In our first month of marriage, J and I have had seven hotel rooms and an apartment. We have slept in two towns in the States, Munich, Ankara (downtown), Ankara (Bilkent), Ankara-Istanbul (sleeper train), Istanbul, Madrid, and Rabat.

We have been in seven airports, one train (two attempted), four planes (five attempted), nine buses, and thirteen taxis. We have been to four continents and spoken (With other people) English, Turkish, Spanish, French, Arabic (Modern Standard), and Arabic (Moroccan Colloquial).

It has been a fantastic month, and I need a nap.

Today

2011-09-12T17:52:00.002-05:00

We get up at 6:30 tomorrow morning and I still have homework, so this will be a quick update, but today was absolutely fantastic. Classes seem great, classmates are interesting and very impressive (several Fullbright scholars, at least one person who works with the U.S. Embassy, a few military officers, and a woman who's worked with the U.S. State Department for over 20 years), coursework looks like it will be very challenging, but in a good way.

Dinner tonight was, I think, one of the best evenings we've ever had in Morocco. Fantastic food, fantastic company, conversation in three different languages, and an invitation to come back soon that we definitely hope to take advantage of.

We'll try to write more soon, but for now...good night!

Safety in Morocco

2011-09-11T15:28:00.000-05:00

We know that a lot of people are worried about our safety while we're in Morocco. Since, again, we're a little cooped up today, A and I found a few statistics that we thought might help:

The violent crime rate (which includes murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and larceny) in the United States is 3503.8 per 100,000 people. In Morocco, it is 19.94.

In the U.S., there are 39.2 rapes per 100,000 people. In Morocco, there are 3.59.

In the U.S., there are 3,025.4 thefts per 100,000 people. In Morocco, there are 7.05.

In the U.S., there are 5 murders per 100,000 people per year. In Morocco, there are 0.4.

So yes, while it's absolutely true that bad things can happen anywhere, I was being quite sincere when I said that we're a lot more worried about all of you back in the U.S. than we're worried about ourselves. We're actually quite a lot safer here.

On a lighter note, just as I was finishing this post, the man who runs our riad invited us to his home for dinner tomorrow night. We like him quite a lot, so we're very excited.

Also, classes start bright and early tomorrow morning. We're looking forward to the class part, not so much to the "bright and early" part. Still, it will be nice to feel a bit less like lazy bums...

A Question For Readers

2011-09-11T10:06:00.000-05:00

So everytime I put up a new post with a lot of pictures on it, loading that post to look at it seems to take forever. I can't tell if that's the internet here, or if the pictures I'm uploading take up too much memory.

Is anyone else having problems with the site? Do they seem to occur more frequently when we put up posts with lots of pictures on them?

Let me know by commenting on this post. Your feedback is appreciated.

FYI...

2011-09-11T08:02:00.000-05:00

Several people have expressed their concern for our safety today. We just wanted to let everyone know two things:

1) We aren't worried. We have never hidden the fact that we were Christian Americans, and we have never been treated badly or felt the slightest bit unsafe because of it. Many Moroccans dislike many of the things our government has done, but we have NEVER seen anyone take it out on us. Just the opposite, in fact - we have consistently been treated with warmth, kindness, and hospitality everywhere we have gone.

2) That being said, we are being careful today. We're planning on only going out once, to get some food and a few other necessities. Other than that, we'll be staying in our riad, which is tucked in the center of the medina and should be perfectly safe even if anything were to happen.

Expect more posts later today. We've got a lot of time to kill, being cooped up in here like this! Meanwhile, be safe - we're a lot more worried for the people in the U.S. than we're worried for ourselves.

Off-Balance

2011-09-10T11:54:00.000-05:00

It's been interesting to see how quickly I've slipped back into my old "Moroccan" habits. I've only been here two days, yet already I seem to have remembered how to give wares in the souq a sort of sliding gaze, looking just long enough to take them in, stopping just soon enough to avoid indicating the degree of interest that will bring a merchant to my side. I've become sort of unconsciously conscious about things like where I'm pointing my feet (to avoid facing my soles towards anyone, a serious offense) and where I'm pointing my fingers (which can also be quite rude.) More than once, I've begun a sentence in French and ended it in Arabic without even realizing it until the conversation was over.

Yet for all that, Morocco still finds plenty of ways to keep me off-balance. It's exhausting and exhilarating at the same time, as I am being constantly reminded how much more there is to communicating with people than speaking their language. There are so many layers beyond that, from facial expressions and body language to different cultural expectations to "assumed knowledge" in the forms of history, politics, religion, and media...all of which make up a much greater part of communication than I think any of us realize until we try to get by in a place where we don't understand those unspoken aspects.

Unfortunately, being too aware of that fact can also cause problems, because it can make you seriously overthink things. Yesterday, A and I were out for a walk in downtown Rabat, and saw a huge crowd gathered around a car. Most of them were grinning and looked very excited, and A and I decided that there must be some sort of celebrity or politician inside. After several minutes of speculating about who it might be (and talking about how frustrating it was to be so ignorant about the "Who's Who" of Morocco), we got closer and saw that, actually, it was just a really big dog* that people were wanting to pet. Go figure.

Just an hour or so later, A and I were sitting and eating lunch at a cafe when we saw an enormous mass of people begin marching down the street chanting some sort of a slogan. There was too much background noise for us to even make out what language they were speaking, much less understand it, but we imagined it must be a political march of some kind. While we were a little nervous, there were several police officers nearby who were carefully watching the marchers, and no one at the cafe seemed at all concerned, so we contented ourselves with trying to speculate about what they were protesting. Finally, I decided to just ask someone else at the cafe. She laughed and said that they were cheering on their football (soccer) team. Oh.

As ignorant as it can make me feel, I love that Morocco resists my most intellectual attempts to pin it down. I love that one day I underthink it, the next day I overthink it. I love that it keeps me off-balance, because that's the best way to stay willing and able to learn. Besides, I can always find some comfort in the fact that, as a white American Christian who speaks Arabic and sometimes wears the hijab, I throw them off-balance, too.

* You may have heard the common claim that Muslims/Arabs hate/fear/are religiously offended by dogs. While there's some truth to that, it really just depends on the Muslim. Basically, there's very little in the Quran about dogs, but there are some Hadiths** of debateable reliability that call dogs unclean. In our (limited) experience, there are a lot more stray dogs in the Middle East than in the U.S., and those dogs would be considered "unclean" by almost anyone. At the same time, it's not at all unusual in Morocco to see people who are, by all appearances, observant Muslims outside taking their pet dogs for walks.

** Hadiths are records of Muhammed's life and sayings. While Hadiths are taken very seriously by Muslims, there are a vast number of them and they have a huge range of "reliability" (basically, the likelihood that they are accurate and truthful.) To further complicate matters, different schools of thought in Islam may have radically different ideas about the reliability of any given Hadith.

The Saga: Part Three; In Which We Follow Strange Arab Men Through Dark Alleys

2011-09-09T19:30:00.003-05:00

Confused about why we're in Morocco and not Turkey? Start reading here and here.

So, it should have been easy to get to the riad. The problem was, whether due to religious beliefs, pure sexism, or something else altogether, the taxi driver seemed to refuse to interact with me. No matter whether I spoke English, French, or Arabic, he would never respond to a word that I said, although he would speak to A fairly freely (for the record, that's never happened before.) That wouldn't have been a major problem except that the directions were in French and the driver didn't seem to speak much English. A tried the best he could to repeat what I said, but enough was lost in translation that the driver seemed to simply grasp onto the one phrase he understood "Qasbah des Oudayas." That was the general area we were supposed to go, but there were more directions from there that he seemed either to not understand or to ignore. He did, however, stop the car several times to ask strangers for directions - unfortunately, everyone told him something different.

Just as I was getting ready to have him let us out so we could find a new taxi driver who knew the area and would actually acknowledge my existence, our driver stopped his car, helped us pull out our luggage, asked A for the address to our riad, and started leading us (carrying one of my bags) into the medina. That late at night (it was, by now, perhaps 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning), especially with the air so heavy with fog, the medina was an incredibly eerie place. It was almost deserted except for stray cats and the occasional group of 20-somethings, mostly men, loitering in doorways. Whispering for A to make sure to stay close, I started following the taxi driver (or, really, my suitcase.) Every so often, he would stop and ask someone for directions. Everyone seemed very friendly and eager to help (we found out later that there are a number of riads in the area and visitors are always getting lost, so there's a sort of understanding between riad ownders that they help each other help their guests out) but everyone seemed to have a different idea of where we should go. Eventually, the taxi driver seemed to have had enough, and passed us over to two young men who, fortunately, were willing to converse with both A and me.

Talking about it later, A and I agree that we were both incredibly grateful that this wasn't our first time in Morocco. It's never a fun thing to be passed back and forth between strange men who are leading you and all your present possessions down strange dark alleys in a foreign country the middle of the night...but we at least knew that, in Morocco, it's extremely common for people to step up and guide people like that. Scams and theft certainly happen, but they're often much rarer than in the U.S. and we've developed a pretty good radar for them. Plus, I was following enough of their Arabic conversations (and they didn't know I spoke Arabic) to be confident that they weren't planning anything sinister unless they were speaking in an extremely clever code.

Anyway, they took us almost all the way to our riad, until we were met by the man who runs it, who they had called to come and help us. He led us the rest of the way there and checked us into our room without any more incident. So that was nice. He then asked us what time we wanted him to make us breakfast. "9:00? 8:30? 8:00?" Hearing the times getting earlier and earlier, I quickly assured him that 9:00 would be wonderful.

The room itself is very small but full of ornate Moroccan flairs that A and I had both missed far more than we'd realized. The mattress is excellent, and despite getting up early for breakfast, I still slept longer (not to mention more deeply) than I have in nearly a week.

The next morning, we woke up and went upstairs for breakfast, only to realize that somehow we had adjusted our clocks incorrectly, and woken up at 7:30 instead of 8:30. Oops. Fortunately, the man was very sweet about it and quickly whipped us up one of the Moroccan breakfasts that we had both missed so much: mint tea, fresh-squeezed orange juice, fresh bread, and jam.

Feeling energized by the copious amounts of sugar we'd just had, and eager to see Rabat in the daylight, A and I then set out to do some exploring. I don't think either us had realized until that point just how much we had missed Morocco. Everything from our favorite soft drink, to the terrifying way you have to cross the street, to the beautiful djellabas that men and women wear, to the bookstores on nearly every block and the patisseries on every corner, just made us feel like we'd finally come home. It was an amazing feeling.

St. Pierre Cathedral

We were able to find two churches within very easy walking distance of our riad (maybe 10 minutes each, all on flat ground. Yay!!) Both of them have daily mass in the evenings. One of them is a medium-sized church on a busy street that is just across from the "Lalla Meriem Creche pour les Enfants Prives des Familles," or the "Mary Home for Children without Families" which we assume that the church operates. I am VERY excited about this, because I am itching for a place to volunteer and I'm hoping that that might be the perfect place to do it. I'd absolutely love to do something with kids, whether it's playing, changing diapers, or teaching French or English. The chance to do it in conjunction with a local church would be even better. The second church was an absolutely breathtaking cathedral with stained-glass windows, an enormous (still used) pipe organ in the back, and mosaic images depicting each of the stations of the cross along the side walls. This church seems to be heavily involved in community charity work, including a prison ministry and an outreach program for immigrants, so I should absolutely be able to find somewhere where I can get involved and be useful. I can't wait!

The bookstore: if you recognize why its name is awesome, you get a cookie!

After visiting the church, A and I went to a bookstore that we absolutely fell in love with. It's packed with fantastic literature, including an enormous wall of Francophone Moroccan authors that I've been dying to check out since last summer. It also has a history section with several books that are exactly in A's main field of research.

Next, we headed to a nearby restaurant where we settled in to have our second real, live, Moroccan meal. For about $6, we each ate our fill of fresh bread, delicious meat and French fries all soaking in the meat's juice, water, and Hawa'i (our favorite Moroccan soda - and yes, I spelled it right.)

So, all in all, despite how difficult, stressful, exhausting, and expensive it was to get here, I think our overwhelming feeling is that it's good to be back.

Good night.