Let me begin my recap of today with a rant about lunch. I went home for lunch today where we had the usual tagine chicken and carrots. While this standard meal is pretty tasty, dessert was the opposite. The one piece of advice is I can give to any college student is: while abroad, you need to watch out for host families that enjoy artichoke. When I lost my artichoke virginity today, I was given a raw, unwashed artichoke at lunch and told to consume it. When you don't know enough of the language to yell, "Never! Give me some freedom fries," you unhappily begin to eat the artichoke. This entails peeling off the tiny individual leaves and eating the bottom 10 to 20% of each one. When I tried this, I ended up eating the bottom 30 to 40% of each leaf, which made me even crabbier. Once done with that, you will feel like Spike from The Land Before Time, who I always believed never talked because he was too disgruntled with the fact that he was a plant eater, but had the most badass name of all the characters. So after stomaching 20-something leaves that I knew my body did not have the chemicals to digest, I put down the bottom of the artichoke and was happy to be done with the trial. ALAS, I WASN'T DONE. No part of the artichoke is wasted in this country. They cleaned up the stem till it was one huge piece of artichoke and played charades with me until I could no longer pretend to not understand that they desperately wanted me to eat that chunk of chlorophyll-filled plant tissue. I thought, "hey, I'll just eat like a bite of it and just casually run off to class an hour early." When I implemented the aforementioned plan, my brother said "put the whole thing in your mouth!" I didn't even have enough time to think, "that's what she said" before he shoved the rest of it into my mouth. I ate it, don't worry, but a small part of me died today. I have since taken two massive fiber-filled dumps, but, no matter how relieving they were, the ends do not justify the means.
To continue complaining about food, I had my usual breakfast of baguette and nutella before school. Arabic class today was fun and I did the walk to and from school 3 times today. It was real hot so I had some nasty back-sweat showing through my button-down whenever I got to my destination. After Professor Sadiqi's class in the afternoon, we decided to all go to Cafe Clock for milkshakes and then to the riad to finally watch the Hunger Games. My chocolate milkshake wasn't very good, but it was fun to sit in a cafe together like real Moroccans do. Watching the Hunger Games was also a good time. I had to explain a lot of stuff that happened in the books that the movie doesn't do a good job of explaining, but everyone seemed to really like the movie. Afterwards, I got home just in time for dinner at 8:30. After dinner, I just read some Steve Jobs, did some homework, put pictures on Facebook, blogged, and skyped with Maddie. She spent the weekend in Iguazu Falls and is having a fun time in Argentina. I was able to do all of these online activities because Ariel and I traded wi-fi sticks. Her Maroc Telecom one wasn't working well in her house and my meditel one wasn't working that well in my house. However, after switching for the night, our "new" modems are working so well that I think the switch will be a permanent one.
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