Tangier, Asilah & Rabat

Hello...okay time for a quick post before embarking on a crazy week of homework, projects, and ending in Spain to visit Nicole (a friend studying in Germany this semester)!

Last weekend, three of the other international students (Anna, Anna, & Aileen) and I signed up to go with the Explorer's Club (group on campus) to Tangier and Asilah. It was quite the adventure.

We left at (get this) 3 am in the morning from the AUI campus and drove the 6 hours to the northern coast where Tangier is located (it's the port to go across the Strait of Gibralter into Spain by ferry) stuffed into two 15-passenger university vans. I proceeded to sleep the entirety of the trip waking up just in time to see the first sight of Tangier the next morning. Good times.

So, the group started out in Tangier that day with breakfast and then went and explored the medina where we met some characters from AUI, I bought some sweet green beaded shoes, and we ended up having lunch in a McDonalds [pretty much the same as in the US just with smaller portions, no value meals, and less choices] with a great view of the bay, see below:

After our walk around the medina and some confusion amongst the group over times and such, we got in the vans again and headed out into the hilly countryside...which was gorgeous. This was the best part of the trip because we never would have seen the views of the coast or gone to the cave Hercule's Grotto (see photo album for pics) on our own, not the kind of place grande taxis take you too. So that was awesome and if you have time to look at the pics you can see that we saw some beautiful views!

By that point I was exhausted, so I basically went back to the hotel and slept waking up briefly for my daily dose of carbohydrates (I swear most of what I eat here is carbs...good times). The next morning, we woke up and left Tangier for Asilah a small town a bit eastward I believe...we stopped for what I thought was just a brief stretch-your-legs-time, but ended up being right on the coast! We tooks some pics and then yours truly thought it would be a great idea to take off her shoes and play in the water...which was awesome. Sometimes there's nothing more freeing than running through shallow waves, digging your feet on the sand, and doing cartwheels on the coast! Small price to pay for being wet and sandy for the rest of the day!

Okay, after that we went to get lunch which took forever and wasn't that great. But it was fun to chat with the other Moroccan students who by this point were buddy-buddy with us and joking around, which was great since sometimes it feels like its really hard to get to know the Moroccan students here. Unfortunately lunch took so long that we didn't have very much time in the medina, which was actually really nice and spacious with some great stuff in the shops. I got some jewelry and really enjoyed just walking around, but before too long it was back in the buses for what seemed like a much-longer van ride back of course. But we played some car games with some of the other students, so that made it go by a little quicker. We arrived back on campus at 11, right on the dot (which is shocking for Moroccan time!). Overall, it was a really enjoyable trip!

SHIFT to this weekend...Aileen and one of the Anna's and I headed up to Rabat for a short day and a half trip...we took a grande taxi to Meknes and then took the 3-hour train to Rabat from there. It was a bit confusing as there were no clear station names nor announcements, so we would have missed our stop had we not seen a friend of ours get off! But luckily we made it and after one random misstop found a decent hotel and set off to explore the city a bit.

We started off by looking at the maps in our guidebook which made the medina (old part of the city) look really far away...yeah when we got in the taxi to have him take us there he looked us pretty funny, and took us the long way which even then was only like 8 blocks. Hilarious. But we had fun going around the city, did some shopping of course. Rabat's medina is a bit more spacious than for example Fez, and the shopkeepers are a lot less hovering which is really nice.

After that, we continued out of the medina to the kasbah (fortified area with an old palace) and got attacked by this young girl wanting to put a henna design on our hands...she grabbed Aileen's hand and stopped before Aileen could even say no! By then, we were all flustered and laughing as the girl instructed me to take pictures while she rapidly drew a henna design all over her hand including what she said was Aileen's name, assuming that we could not read Arabic, but alas we may look like tourists but we can read Arabic and will soon have our Moroccan resident cards! So, of course Aileen had to pay her a bit even though she didn't want it, but it was another good lesson to learn to immediately say "LA!" (no in Arabic) to dissuade any young teenagers who may want to take advantage of foreigners.

We walked around the gardens in the kasbah for awhile and then headed back through the city in time to see the sun set over the city walls and see this really huge fortress of a church that was built in the 1930s. It basically looks like the colonial powers wanted to say, "BAM we're hear to stay" and so built a huge two tiered white church...massive. We dropped our purchases off at our hotel and went off in search of a sushi resturant that we'd heard was really good.

At this point I must pause and explain. I am all for eating cultural foods when you are overseas, and I have certainly tried tangine and couscous and other foods native to Morocco and the region. I even enjoy them. However, being at AUI most of what I eat is the same thing over and over again as the dining hall here is much like any college campus dining services across the world...not very good. So, I eat a lot of carbs. I exist on bread. And therefore there is a lot of discussion of foods that we miss from back home and dreaming of Jimmy John's Turkey Tom sandwiches, Donatos pizza, Olive Garden pasta (they manage to ruin pasta here at the dining hall, and I realize this is hard to do), green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, peanut butter...you get the picture.

Thus, Anna and I were craving sushi and so we found this resturant, called Matsuri which ended up being excellent! It was set up apparently like a traditional resturant where the chefs are out in the main area cutting up the sushi and then they put it on plates on a conveyor built and it goes around and you can just pick up what you want from your table! It was sooo good! We had a really good time and got ourselves dessert and wine afterwards and so just had a perfect girls night out! It would have been even better had the movie theater been open afterwards, but alas we can't win them all (it's become a game to find an actual movie theater in Morocco in the hopes of seeing Babel or some other movie while we're here, but I'm rapidly losing hope).

The next morning we got up and had breakfast at a bakery (breakfast is the best meal of the day here in Morocco!) and got some cookies for the train ride home and then grabbed and early train back and arrived back in Ifrane safely about 4 hours later! In time to go to church and do some homework!

So, that was the weekend finishing off my February travels with a bang! This week, I have some work to catchup on as its getting close to some paper deadlines and midterms, alas. Academics does intercede into more fun travels at times, but hopefully all will be well!

God's blessings wherever you are!

Check out the pics!

So, I'll update later telling about my adventures from last weekend in Tangier & Asilah with the Explorer's Club and my jaunt tomorrow up north to Rabat...but for now if you want to see pictures of me and and the Mediterranean beach! Check out the link to the right for my photo album!

God's peace!

Arabic-English Exchange

Hello! Sorry, I haven't posted in awhile. Technology has not been my friend this week as my internet has not worked in my room since I returned from Tangier this past weekend, and on top of that I had my first busy week of schoolwork since I arrived at Al Akhawayn...so basically my week has consisted of going back and forth between the library, packing and unpacking my backpack, re-setting up my labtop, reading, doing work and studying. Ah, the life of a student.

But, an update about travels and classes later, for now I want a bit of excitement from teaching English at the local high school here in Ifrane tonight! I and some of the other international students (about 10 of us now) made a commitment to teach English two nights a week starting about 2 weeks ago after meeting with the government delegate in charge of education here in the Ifrane province. We were all a little nervous at first, but its been a great experience so far!

We're teaching about 80-90 girls overall (broken up into about 5 classes) who live in the residential part of the school as they come from all over the province. So, we come at about 7:00pm and teach until 8:30 in this huge school with echo-y dark hallways, a huge room full of chopped wood to heat the classrooms, and classrooms lining hallways that consist of basically desks and chalkboards (sometimes with chalk, sometimes not) and of course the students! The students range from like 15-19 and are all at varying levels of English preparing for the big test they have to take before graduation, so we're trying to help them review and get ready!

I and my co-teacher Caly basically go in and teach whatever "lesson" we've prepared and then help them with their homework, which usually takes up the majority of the time as their English book is awful. To give you a sense, their latest lesson is a two page reading on pollution in the mediterranean sea, complete with a list of diseases like typhoid and cholera and a lot of hard verbs and nouns that seem a bit ridiculous for beginning-intermediate students, but whatever. Of course, its a little harder to get over the grammatical mistakes like misspelling "paragraph."

Anyway, we've had a lot of fun teaching them the words for clothing (today I made a worksheet with pics of clothes & accessories from the internet!) and talking about verb tenses and parts of speech. Today, we went over time which was also really fun...and convenient as we just finished reviewing time in my Arabic class, so I got to totally pull out my fledgling Arabic skills, and it totally even helped me explain the conecpt of "15 minutes till, 20 minutes after" in English! A small step, but I was excited nonetheless!

The girls are all really sweet and eager to learn and they love Caly and I so its a fun hour of us acting out English concepts, laughing and attempting to teach them a little something too!

Although, Caly and I were talking today about how its still a bit crazy that we're doing this...just being thrust into a school as volunteers with no curriculum, supervision, or really any goal except the overall "teach English." Granted we were vouched for by the chaplian and have the reputation of AUI international students, who are at least from an English-speaking country...but still, certainly a long way from the rigidness of the US educational system at home with benchmarks, requirements, and probably background checks...okay maybe not that much, but you get the picture.

Anyway, I'm really excited to continue the experience partly because its good to get away from abstract academic thinking and do something active where i really get to help these girls and try out my Arabic skills a bit, but its also fun to think about different ways to teach English, and realize again and again how hard it is to learn another language!

Okay, the library's closing. So there's my fun experience for the night. And here's a picture of me and some of my students!

Ma-salaama!

Middle Atlas = Love

Well this weekend I made the rounds to a couple of the small towns/cities in the Middle Atlas region (the Middle Atlas mountains are the mid-range mountains in Morocco, the High Atlas are as would seem to be obvious, at a higher altitude) and decidedly fell in love with the region! The Middle Atlas is a pocket of mountains (perhaps large hills really) followed by valley after valley full of a wide variety of trees and crops and then more mountains (and repeated again and again). It's great. :-)

Anyway, my Middle Atlas tour started off on Saturday, when my friend Cassie and I set off for Imouzzer, a small town about 20 minutes away from Ifrane. It was a bit intimidating at first because its not one of those towns that gets a lot of tourists clearly and there were a lot of people out and about, and two foreign girls do get attention by virtue of being 1) female without male escort, 2) looking foreign, and 3) obviously being tourists walking around with little aim but to see what we could see. But we soon got into the scheme of things and enjoyed walking around Imouzzer. The town sits in the mountains on the road leading towards Fez and looks out over a valley towards more mountains, so we had a great time searching for the best views and got to poke around the town while we were at it. [See mosque on left.] After our brief exploration of Imouzzer, we climbed in another taxi and after gaining a couple more passengers we headed off towards Sefrou.

I didn't know much about Sefrou before we went, just what my pastor and guidebook had told me, but it turned out to be great! It has an old medina like that of Fez, but its much more relaxed and less crowded, and also both in and outside the old city is cleaner and seems to be a bit like a mountain oasis.

View of Sefrou from the edge of town.

Cassie and I had a great time exploring inside Sefrou's city walls. It has many of the same stone-lined walkways that wind throughout the city like Fez, except with less people and a bit less craziness. It very much feels like an ordinary city that people live/work/play in...yet still has a certain character that makes it very Moroccan/Middle Eastern-North African/and a bit otherworldly to the American eye. Cassie and I basically had fun getting lost; we would walk for awhile and then look around and realize that we were back where we started, so then start again and take a different turn. We got some wierd looks, met a few fun little kids, got some great harsha and bread for lunch, ended up finding some fun nooks and crannies where it felt a bit like an ultimate game of hide-and-go-seek and saw some amazing architecture. Sefrou, like Fez varies at every bend, you turn one corner and find yourself amidst small shops stock full with shoes, designer clothes from the US, scarves and material, and other odds and ends. But a minute later, you find yourself seeing welders and woodworkers making doors or gates or various other products, and then after another bend your nose is assaulted with the smell of fresh bread, spices, and the bright colors of fruits and veggies.

Unsurprisingly, we found our way out of the city gates accidentally and found ourselves in a more modern part of the city with a bit more space between shops, modern-looking buildings, and some beautiful park spaces with fountains, trees and cafes. There was definitely quite a bit of upscale housing in Sefrou, intermixed with the more-common 2-3 story buildings that were built on top of one another over the years and look a bit dilapatated.

However, we didn't have to walk too far before we came to this temporary marketplace full of fruits and vegetables for rows and rows and rows...it was just set up in the middle of a field and smelled more or rotten/spoiled produce until you stepped under the tent covers. We didn't end up buying anything, but walked around some more before getting back into the grand taxi and heading home for the day.

On Sunday, after a lovely morning of sleeping in, a couple of the girls and I headed to Azrou which is only about 15 minutes away from Azrou and has amazing views along the way. We were blessed with AMAZING weather this weekend - i didn't wear a coat for like the first time since I've been here! So, it was a great ride along the way. Sadly, we didn't get to see a whole lot in Azrou because some of the shops were closed and we didn't have directions as to what to check out, but it was fun to walk around and get a sense of the town if nothing else.

A view of Azrou.

So that was my weekend, pretty lowkey but certainly fun to see a bit more of the area around where I'm living for the semester. Now another week of academics coming up and the beginning of volunteering at the local Ifrane high school. Should be fun!