Getting My Feet Wet

It is official that Brian and Clark will be visiting me in Morocco in a few short weeks and I am very excited!

The photo uploader is not working right now so I am going over my week but I have no pictures posted. If you would like to see more photos of Marrakech, please click here.

Emma and I had an absolutely breathtaking view in the morning of the Atlas mountains from the outdoor stairwell in our hotel. I have never seen snow covered mountains (except in a plane) before, and this sight was amazing. Hopefully I will be able to cross over them sometime during my stay here and visit the Sahara desert on the other side. The parts of Morocco I have visited (as well as Rabat) are lush in vegetation, not at all the dry and dusty streets I imagined before my departure.

I had a very good Friday as well. The morning I played tennis with Emma at the club...again we were exiled away from the cute Moroccan boys to a far flung corner, but we did manage to sneak a few peeks at the boys playing (as well as the awe inspiring boy who was no older than ten who could kick both our butts). Emma won, but I do not mind as she is super nice and did not rub it in my face! :)

After that I went over to my host brother's house for some couscous since it was Friday after all and it was very yummy. They live about five blocks from my host mother and myself and their apartment is beautiful. It has the traditional Moroccan tiled mosaics all over the walls. They also had the same gigantic flat screen Samsung that my mother owns tuned to a French channel for me. Watching television during meals is just part of Moroccan custom and when they have foreign guests over they usually will have a channel on that is in that guest's native language (or one they know fairly well in my case).

After a lovely meal and watching a French circus on television, my host mother and I headed back to our apartment and I headed to the former church down the street and met up with Maria. We walked to the Centre Ville and took a rather bumpy bus to Temara outside of Rabat. Temara is a beach town along the Atlantic coast and I have a feel full of rather prominent families. We met up with her friend Kenza who lives there and walked along the cliffs and down to the beach. Maria and I took off our shoes and walked in the water, despite the fact it was probably 40 degrees outside. Kenza thought we were nuts, naturally. My host mother thinks that me being sick yesterday is due to wading in the water...

Following our ocean excursion we went back to Kenza's house, preceded by a brief stop at the hanuut (little store) where her and Maria bought an insane amount of candy and tried to give me a huge pile of! Don't worry mom and dad, I only accepted a little bit! I do not know how all these people are so skinny! Anyway, I met Kenza's parents (and briefly her brother) and they served me tea and we spent a good hour and half talking about American politics and policies and my experiences in Morocco. He also put on the European news about a plane crash in New York since I had no idea something had happened in my country! It was amazing because our entire conversation took place in French and they were very friendly. Maria's dad picked us up and drove me back to Océon (my neighborhood in Rabat), all the while explaining to me the history of Berbers (Maria's family is Berber, an ethnic group in Morocco that most North Africans are descended from) in Morocco and I even heard snippets of Berber when Maria and him were talking. It is amazing, she is fluent in Berber, Arabic, French, and English and is taking Spanish classes.

Images are not uploading right now so I will post them in my next blog entry with explanations about what everything is. Sorry about the content heavy, photo light entry!

With that said, I am thinking about putting up a new layout for the Blogger because it seems rather squashed in terms of viewing photos, and those, I think, are the most important thing of a travel blog! We'll see how lazy I am this week.