Here I am

Hi everyone, I finally made up my mind and decided to make a blog. I’ll try to post now and then, but feel free to email me as well.

I’ve been in Morocco for a week, now, and here are a few things I’ve learned so far:

Lesson #1: It is, in fact, hot here. I flew into Casablanca and took a train to Rabat—about a two-hour trip. I was pretty glad about the nine-dollar ticket, but spending two hours in stuffy cars without air conditioning is sticky sticky sticky. Especially when the second half of it is spent in a two-foot wide aisle trying to arrange my 90lbs of luggage to allow people to pass. Which brings me to Lesson #2: I brought too much stuff. Big surprise.

Lesson #3: Rules apply differently. As soon as the airplane landed, everyone stood up, even though we were still moving, and the flight staff didn’t seem to care. Traffic appears to be a matter of everyone fending for themselves. Many intersections don’t have traffic lights, and crosswalks are non-existent. Crossing the street feels like a game of frogger. In the airport, we (there were two other students on my flight) were supposed to meet another student who had come in on a different flight, and couldn’t find her. I asked the airport information booth to make an announcement, and the woman simply ushered me into the back room and handed me the microphone.

Lesson #4: French is a useful language after all. The majority of people here don’t seem to speak English, but nearly everyone speaks French, so speaking it gives me the ability to communicate freely and get around. My French is holding up pretty well, too. For things like directions, and buying things, I’m set, though I’m realizing as I try to have more complicated conversations that my comprehension is somewhat general and requires a bit of guesswork, and often I’m left only 70% sure that I really know what’s going on.

Lesson #5: I will be thrown into things unprepared. We spent most of the first week in an orientations to prepare us for life here, but our orient-ors employed an interesting order of operations, which included telling us about bargaining and sending us out into the souk (the market) without teaching us the numbers. “How much for that?” “hgarhfgawi;hefuia” ….

My favorite part was the drop off. They took us in the bus and drove around the city, dropping us off one by one (before the seminar on harassment, of course), and telling us to find our way back. And it was no joke—I didn’t even get lost, and my walk back took more than an hour. I have a pretty good sense of direction most of the time, and love wandering foreign cities, so I thoroughly enjoyed exploring, finding interesting things like old palaces, open gates and shanty towns, and trying to covertly pull out my camera to snap pictures.

On Thursday, we moved in with our host families. They didn’t tell us anything about them in advance, and I was super nervous, but my family’s really nice. They all speak fluent French, which made me realize how nice it is to be able to talk freely with a host family right from the beginning. I have a 13 year old sister named Boutayna who is my new best friend, and a 16 year old brother named Mohammad who doesn’t talk to me.

This is getting long and I have tons more to write, so I’ll continue over the next few days…or weeks.