We started the day off with our second Arabic class. In two hours, I took four pages of notes and had one mind blown. At our current rate of progress, I get the feeling we will be at least strong intermediate speakers by the time we leave Morocco. We learned a bunch of verbs, how to say where we are from, where we are, and just lots of vocabulary in general. In my opinion, it was still a really fun class and he wore a jallabrah today which made everything twice as cool.
After class, we went to Lla MJ and Si Ron's apartment for lunch. They had their housekeeper cook us massive bowls of cous-cous, like enough to feed two small African villages for a couple months. You could bath multiple small children in each of the two communal bowls and I am convinced that she cut up an entire pumpkin and put it on top of the cous-cous in addition to all the other vegetables. After the tasty lunch, we watched a Moroccan film called A Door in the Sky which is about three siblings who are bequested a riad upon their father's death and follows one of the two daughters who tries to turn it into a women's shelter and her transition from a life in Paris to a return to her Moroccan roots. It was from the late 1980's and was decent. Not much seemed to happen and we didn't finish the movie in one sitting.
After the movie, which was our scheduled activity for Lla MJ's class today, we had a capital-F Fascinating lecture on the linguistic situation in Morocco by a Prof. El-Ayachi. He explained the many languages spoken in Morocco today, their history as they pertain to Morocco, and the use of Arabic and its dialects throughout the Middle East. It was just so cool. Although he dealt mostly with the socio-linguistic side of things, he delved a little into hard linguistics in answering some our questions, which was fun for me because I was able to use what I learned at this time last year in my Linguistics 1 class. This lecture today blew yesterday's lecture out of the water and everyone was awake and very engaged. I will discuss this in a later post when I have less to talk about.
When we left ALIF, we were approached by 4 of the 7 students who are here from the University of Minnesota. We'd been hanging out with them in the ALIF courtyard a bit and they wanted to check out our hotel and the pool we'd been bragging about (but have still yet to use). We asked them a lot of questions about our home stays because they have been here for 7 weeks already. They have spring break next week, but we're going to have a party with them tomorrow night which should be fun. One of the tips we were given before leaving America was to make friends with the other people studying at ALIF and, in doing so, we would have more fun. I think we are starting to see the value in that and are all looking forward to tomorrow night!
We are off to dinner now at the one Thai restaurant in town. Afterwards, we are going to try to watch the Hunger Games because it's already been illegally distributed over here, less than a week after it came out!
Lastly, I put up more pictures today from the past three days. Lots are of the Medina. The issue is that Facebook albums have a 200 picture limit, so I have already had to create a second album. Here are the links to both the original album (in case you are too lazy to go back on the blog to find it) and to the new album.
Album 1:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151423763520461.823111.867195460&type=3&l=cdfcc8f520
Album 2: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/set=a.10151438720835461.825141.867195460&type=1&l=efa0b4050d
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