Je voudrais un hamburger avec fromage...

Let's get this off the chest, right off the bat...I'm not witty but I am going to make as many clever and cute remarks I can make, and they will rarely fall into either of those categories. With that said, onto the pulp.

I spent my Friday night in a hotel in Montreal after my Royal Air Maroc flight was cancelled. After calling my father sobbing, inhaling some food after barely eating all day, and spending ten minutes trying to teach my mother how to unmute her computer so we could have a proper conversation through Skype, I finally calmed down and spent the rest of my evening watching reruns of American crime dramas and slept a bit. In the morning I awoke and headed to the airport around 7:30 a.m., and grateful I did. Although my flight wasn't until 11, due to the fact that two flights to Casablanca had been cancelled that week, I spent about two hours in line to get my ticket. I don't even care, I was so thankful to get a ticket.

The flight itself was not too bad, it was definitely a second hand jet, probably purchased from Air France--but a 747 that got us to Casablanca in one piece nonetheless. I sat next to a kind, middle aged woman with purple hair who was either French of from Quebec--I think French...who spoke a little English. I landed around 10:45 p.m., grabbed my baggage and spent more than twenty minutes searching for my driver to take me to my hotel in Rabat--all the time my stomach churning, worrying that he was not going to come. I'm sure I gave myself an ulcer for no reason! He did come, well his younger brother found me, they had been told the wrong terminal. The ninety minute drive from Casablanca to Rabat was pleasant, the driver and his brother chatted with me, clearly interested in their fare. I do not speak the darija dialect of Arabic spoken here, I know fusha (pronounced fuss-ha), or classical Arabic; thus, we communicated in French instead. My driver turned up Backstreet Boys real loud when I laughed after they came on, explaining I listened to them when I was very young. I arrived at the hotel at about 1:05 in the morning.

They accidentally booked me with one of the guys on the trip--it's illegal for unwed people of the opposite sex to share a hotel room in Morocco. Luckily, I got details from Dante, the guy I woke up when trying to get into the room, for what was happening the next morning with the program. Around 1:30 I got into a room by myself and saw there were no clocks, Moroccans have a very lax concept of time apparently. I plugged in my travel alarm clock and was ready to cry when I watched it burn out. I was exhausted. Luckily Moroccans believe in wake-up calls, even if they don't believe in clocks! All ended well and I found my fellow study abroaders the next morning who were more than happy to show me the way to AMIDEAST, my school for the next 4 months.