While today is Thursday, it's really our Friday! We started our day by walking to school and then attending Arabic class. It was our first class with our new Arabic professor. There are two professors teaching the class and switching off, so it was the first time we met the other professor. He is slightly older than Si Mohammed and slightly less personal, but taught us so much in those three hours. We learned both the past tense and the imperative tense, and all of their irregular forms, in addition to reviewing all the vocabulary we know, how to count numbers 11 - 2,000, and basic words for haggling. It was a lot!
After class, we trekked home to the medina for our first lunch with our families. Because of a taxi strike, it is hard to commute home for lunch during our 2.5 hour lunch break. Because the walk is so long, we can only end up spending like 30-45 minutes at home for lunch if we walk both ways. We walked home and I ate with my family while watching more Turkish soap operas. After lunch, I walked back to school for our Gender in the Medina class.
After class, we went to figure out the wi-fi modem situation once and for all. It's a hassle because so many people in the medina use them so they don't work that well at night, the one time that WE only need them. I can download things at lightning speed at 7:30 before school, but come 5 pm, I basically need to have all of my online activity done or I need to wait until midnight or later when the bandwidth starts to free up to do stuff online. I got a meditel router (they are the carriers of the iPhone over here) because they are supposed to have a pretty solid data network. We also took pictures for our ALIF ID cards before walking home. If you've been keeping up with the math, I did the walk 4 times today so I ended up walking about 10 - 11 miles in total. Talk about some fitness!
Meredith, Tash, and Joe finally figured out how to get home, so they showed us their house. Their host parents invited us in for tea, so we went up to the roof top and had tea. They live in a riad and it is gorgeous. They have a huge banana tree in the middle of their home and queen-size beds too. We talked on the rooftop terrace and watched Fez light up as the sun set. You could see my roof top from their roof top, but we'd have to be on the phone in order to communicate.
At home, my brothers' friend Reda was over. He was nice and capable of speaking Spanish, so I spoke a little spanish with him. We had a delicious dinner and then I watched an American movie called The Tourist with Lotfi. It had been excellently dubbed into French to the point that even their lips seemed to be mouthing the French words rather than the English words. Afterwards, I played a game of rummy with Lotfi (I won) and I taught him how to play Ratscrew (which he won). I read some Steve Jobs and then went to sleep.
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