June 13

Okay so I was wrong. The boy speaks much better English than I do Arabic. He made fun of me the other night because Christiano Ronaldo got sold to his team, and we are able to talk pretty easily between my Arabic and his English. Even though I can’t understand about 99% of what the family is saying, I feel like I know their personalities just through body language and movements, etc. They are a very nice, casual family, just as you would find at home. The dad is an engineer and the mom stays home and is a very good sewer. The boy and girl are into American music and movies and everything, also. I am very comfortable here now, especially after finding out how good the food is! When we went to Madiha’s house the other day, her mother apologized about 10 times for the lack of food, and it was a 4 course meal. One of the words I know and hear the most is “kul! Kul!” which means “Eat! Eat!” Breakfast is usually just bread with a lot of different spreads, like butter, cheese, or jam, and coffee. The mom or the dad make it for me before I go to school and we eat out in the garden/porch/sunroom, whatever you would call it. It’s a little enclosed outdoor area right off the living room with no ceiling in one part and a tent-ish thing on another. There are some caged birds in there and a turtle. The turtle didn’t move for the first few days and I asked if it was dead and they all laughed at me. Apparently it’s 30 years old so it doesn’t move much.
After breakfast I walk to school, which takes about 45 minutes. I could take the bus but I’m not confident in my directional abilities to know where to get on and where to get off, so I have the walking route drawn on the map. All the streets here are very confusing, though. First of all, the signs of the streets are perpendicular to the street instead of parallel, which has been throwing me off. Also, some of the streets are French names and some are Arabic names, so the translations are spelled completely differently on the map than on the street sign. For instance, “Rue al khattib il ouddane” is more like “rue al kateeb il wadane.” So it takes a while to figure everything out. At school I take 2 classes, an Arabic class by myself with a woman teacher . She only speaks Arabic and French so we have to use a lot of hand motions, etc. to get the lessons across, but it’s going well. My other class is with the other 2 students and it’s basically just a survey course on Morocco.
Usually after class, we have something to do like walk around the medina or have some Moroccan students take us to lunch. We have three Moroccan buddies who speak excellent English, and they are hilarious. They took us to a jazz festival last night in Chellah and it was really sweet. It was amazing to think we were Americans watching a European jazz band on Roman ruins in Morocco. Crazy.
Morocco is full of so many customs. I expected living with a Muslim family to be very different, but it’s really not. The house is decorated with a lot of Quran passages and there is a section of the living room that is decorated for prayer only. The family is religious, but I kind of steer clear from them to give them their privacy when they are praying so I’m not sure if they actually do it five times a day. Some families do, some kind of condense them into fewer prayers. They do have a clock that goes off with the _______ 5 times a day. It is very beautiful, but it takes some getting used to because it goes off every morning at 4 a.m. On Friday, the holy day, everybody eats couscous, and the couscous here is excellent. Also, the tea here is some of the best I’ve had. It’s a very hot, very sweet mint tea that they drink all day long, and it’s poured from very high up from the glasses to “reveal the aroma” or something. Needless to say I love this very much. There is definitely some kind of spring cleaning deal going on right now in my house, because I just left my room and an African (I know they’re all African, but even the Moroccans call the black people Africans. Weird, huh?) is here ripping out the couch cushions with my house mom and doing some kind of mass cleaning with incense. More to come later.