Host family time!

Well folks, its the moment you've been waiting for, my next update! Well, lots of the things have been happening since I last wrote, but probably the most important has been the move to my host family. The Sediki (which means my friend) family consists of 5 members. Abdelghafor is the father. He used to work for the ministry of communication, is 52, and retired. He now just does carpentry to pass the time and he's quite talented. I know what you're all thinking, but he really is 52 and retired!!! Next is Meryem, Abdelghafors wife. She is an incredible cook and really nice. Next comes Soufian. He's 24 and goes to a culinary school (i think) outside of casablanca. Marwan is 19 and a student at Mohammed V in Rabat. He's studying economics and wants to be a banker. Finally we have 9 year old Latifa, who is ridiculously adorable.

Anyway, we moved in yesterday. Abdelghafor and Marwan picked us up from the Amideast building and we walked to their house, which is in the same neighborhood, called Agdal. Thankfully our family lives only a 10 minute walk from Amideast. We met the rest of the family and got a tour of the appartment. To be honest I really know nothing about apartment size or whatever, but they have a very nice apartment. They have a kitchen, a guest room (which i guess is the equivalent of one of those really goyish living rooms that have the nice furniture that nobody really spends any time in),  A bedroom that has a king sized bed and a twin sized bed, although to be honest i have no clue who sleeps in that room yet. Next is mine and Jonathan's room (Jonathan is the other guy from my program at the house). I took a picture of our room for you all to see. Finally is the family room/living room. The walls are lined with couches and there is a tv and computer. There is also a table (i think abdelghafor made it) and we eat every dinner in this room.

Dinners in Morocco are quite different from dinners in the states, or at least they're different from dinners at home. We eat while watching tv, which is apparently common in every moroccan household.  Its very weird for me but its ok. Dinner at least the past 2 nights has stretched quite far into the night. Last night after an hour and a half watching tv and eating, and by eating I mean Meryem basically demanding that we eat more. "Kul" which i think is the command form for eat in arabic was basically the most common word she said. Glad to see that Jewish and Muslim mothers have at least that much in common. Anyway after an hour and half me and Jonathan moved to the balcony where we were served tea with Soufian and Marwan. Moroccan tea is basically the best thing ever. Its incredibly sugary and minty and delicious. Also the process is great, but i think i'll save that for another post. Anyway we drank tea and ate more dessert and talked to Soufian and Marwan. Jonathan speaks french but no Arabic and I speak a little arabic. Every member of the family speaks Arabic and French, but Soufian and Abdelghafor speak enough english to communicate with me. Marwan takes english classes at Amideast and his english is fantastic. We talked about all sorts of things and were out there for another 2 hours. It was fantastic. Then Marwan showed us around Agdal and we ate delicious pumpkin seeds. It was a great night.

One note about Rabat and the fantastic time I've been having: Its hot as hell in Rabat right now. Apparently its been hotter since ive been here than it was all summer. Today was 102 degrees fahrenheit, and I was outside walking around Rabat from 10:30-2:00. Also the only thing really missing from the Seddiki house is air conditioning, or a fan. Its pretty brutal here.

Some variety of orthodox church

Anyway, Here are some pictures of Rabat. Just so you all know for the future, if the pictures have very weird angles and are kind of odd, its because most Moroccans (especially shopkeepers) don't like pictures to be taken of them and their shops. Oh well. Such is life. Until next time. Laila sayeeda (good night)!

A guy sleeping on the street in front of a really cool picture

Bank of Morocco

Me and Raechel in front of a gate to the Medina

My room! My bed is the one on the left

A Shop in the Souk

Keyf Keyf

So after a long day of introductions, walking around, doing a little touring, and zoning out, a bunch of people decided to go to the Medina at night. A medina, according my pretty meh guidebook is "a densely packed urban conglomeration enclosed within defesnive walls set with lookout towers." All in all a pretty interesting place, especially at 10:00 pm, when it was packed to the brim with people who had definitely not been out when I was there around 5 due to Ramadan.  Anyway, imagine the area of the medina that I was in as Machane Yehuda in Jerusalem...on crack. We walked around the medina for an hour or so, just taking it all in.  It really is fascinating how cheap everything is there, with most pieces of "Adidas" or "Nike" or "Prada" clothes or sweatsuits costing less than $12.  Oh, and there was food everywhere. Fresh dates and prickly pears and delicious orange juice everywhere you looked. This wasn't really a camera trip, but don't worry, the next one will be.

Anyway, one of the most important things to happen today happened after we got back to the hotel.  We asked for our roomkeys (apparently in other countries you often leave your key at the reception or concierge) and while we got them, we also got an hour and a half Arabic language seminar. We communicated with the security guard Zouahir and the bellhop Abdil in an odd mix of Standard Arabic (which moroccans call Arabic, so from here on, its just Arabic),  Darija, French, Spanish, and a dash of English for good measure. I considered telling them that I spoke Hebrew when they asked me what other languages I spoke, since almost everyone on the program knows/is learning at least one other language aside from Arabic (damn overachievers), but I decided to wait on that front. Anyway, we tons about the differences in pronunciation between Darija and Arabic, and a bunch of different words for the same thing. In fact, keyf keyf means "same same" according to Zouahir, which was incredibly useful to figure out differences in Darija and Arabic. However, its important to know that keyf by itself means marijuana...Oh the joys of a new language!

Getting Here, and Here I am

I'm here!! It's pretty crazy but I made it after something like 16 hours of traveling.  While the traveling itself was incredibly easy it was also remarkably boring. I flew from Chicago to Spain, and basically everyone on the plane only spoke Spanish.  I speak no Spanish, and so didn't interact with anyone on the plane (although trust me, I wanted nothing more than to brag about the fact that I was going to Morocco to any and everyone, it just wasn't in the cards).

My parents had warned me that there was very little English in the terminal in Madrid so I was prepared for the worst. It started bad with security. The man in front of me had clearly not flown anywhere in the past 10 years.  He had basically any and everything that would make the xray machines go off. It took him about 10 minutes to go through security. Alas, I finally got through, but realized my ticket listed 3 possible terminals for my flight. So I asked someone at a help desk for help, but prefaced it with “habla englais? He showed a gesture meaning “very little,” I then tried to break my simple question into as easy a form as possible “hmmm, uhhhhh, well..., where do I go?” he immediately responded back with almost completely unaccented english. Afterwards I said, “so when you said you don't speak any english...?” He replied “...yeah...” with a mischievous grin. Well played sir, well played.

The flight to Casablanca was basically empty, which was quite odd. It was a pretty big plane, with 6 seats per row.  Anyway, I got off the plane, went through customs without a hassle and met my cab driver Majit (at least I think that was his name). Then we drove...Let me tell you, anytime you think that people are shitty drivers in America, just thank God you don't live somewhere where there are no driving laws. Since I've gotten here I've been in 3 cars with 3 different drivers, and not a single one really follows traffic laws. Although no one does, so its not that I'm just special. The drive from Casablanca (or Dar al-Bayda, both of which mean "white house") to Rabat was around an hour and half, even with the driver driving 120 Km (or 75mph) the entire way there. Majit and I spoke for about 20 or so minutes in a weird combination of Darija (moroccan arabic), Fus-ha(modern standard arabic), and French(although only Majit spoke french). He dropped me off at the hotel and we parted ways, but not until he liberated me of about $70.

The hotel is pretty nice, although its very warm here, both inside and out of the room so I went exploring. I walked for a while then took a petit taxi to the amideast office, found out there was no one there but a security guard, then took another back to the hotel. Then I got some food, studied some arabic, and went to bed at 9:30. I slept until 1.

I woke up to the receptionist banging on my door, which apparently came after 10 minutes of calling my room to get me to switch to my room for the rest of orientation. I then finally started meeting people. There are some incredibly interesting people on the program. People from all over the country, even a couple not from the states. One girl is from Mauritius, which I found out is a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. There are some orthodox Jews and devout christians and everyone seems really smart and ready to learn and make friends and all that lovely stuff.  I've already made some friend and I'm really excited to meet everyone when they aren't really tired and out of it.

Ok, so I'm sure you're all really tired of my rambling, and I promise my other posts won't be as long or boring. But one last thing: Dinner tonight. In case you didn't know, it's Ramadan, which means that Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. They usually wake up at like 4 in the morning to eat, then the next meal is around 7. This means that most restaurants aren't open (except for McDonalds of course) during the day. They usually open up around 8, after most people have already broken the day's fast. So a bunch of us went out for Foutour (break fast) tonight, and had the traditional Moroccan fare. that means Special moroccan bread, delicious soup with hummus(chickpeas), dates, an egg, a special honey drenched fried desert thing, a glass of milk, a glass of delicious fresh squeezed orange juice, and a small pot of awesome moroccan mint tea. It was fantastic. I feel a little bad for not taking a picture of it and posting it here, but then again, considering i'm probably going to be eating something similar to that for dinner for the next 2 weeks or so, i'll probably have another opportunity to take a picture and share it with my adoring readers!

Anyway, I'm going to sleep now, even though I haven't even been up for more than 12 hours yet today! haha my kind of life. Again, don't stop reading because this post was so long, they'll be shorter and even more chock-full of sarcasm in the very near future. Good night and Good Luck!

The Mohammed V Airport in Casablanca

The view outside my hotel window

My plane to Spain

Some dude chilling on top of a truck full of cows. 

D-2 or The day before the day before

Hi Everyone,

This post is basically just to make sure that my blog works. Hopefully this looks decent. I'm incredibly excited to be leaving at about this time tomorrow, but also a little nervous, mostly about getting to Morocco and not speaking a real word of Darija. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to man up. Here are the two bags i'm planning of living out of for the next 5ish months. Its gonna be a crazy journey. Well, here I go!

Completely Packed...I Think