9.11

9.10/9.11
My teachers keep telling me I look Moroccan which I think is great except I apparently still shed an American vibe because I nonetheless get spoken too in catcalled English… only a good sign of looking Western. But if I can maybe one day trick someone I’d feel pretty happy… good thing I accidently got so tan this summer.
We started really getting into the school part of this study abroad thing this week. Besides the 90 hours of Arabic, the Culture and Society aspect is really split into 3 categories. One being lectures and presentations (speakers and performances from people from all over the country from all aspects of cultural life—i.e. music, dance, politics, development, woman’s rights etc.) The other third is the field studies seminar where, in groups, we take a topic and spend a few weeks at a time researching it and gathering information. Each week we present for 15 minutes on where we are on our research and at the end of each month-ish we give the final big thing apparently. The first presentation has to revolve around Ramadan and we can choose where we go from there. My group decided to do the economic implications of cafes and restaurants during Ramadan considering no one eats during the day and when they do eat, it almost always tends to be at home because the holiday so centers around coming together to break the fast each evening. It seems like cafes would lose a lot of business—night clubs, for example, are totally closed because “no one drinks during Ramadan.” Who knows where it will take us but I’m sure we will uncover some very interesting stuff… the third part of the program is the ISP which is the individual study program. The hope being we take our practice with the group research and independently do our own big project. This part of the program is the last 4 weeks—kind of like the “final.” We met individually today with our professors to talk about our idea for our ISP—because we pretty much have a broad range to choose whatever topic we’d like—and I’m still flirting with a few ideas. They are very supportive and will probably be able to give me lots of good references and connections once research really begins in a few weeks. Ugh.. I guess I really am in school huh…
I’m leaving tomorrow morning for our weekend excursion to the 4 dynasites of Morocco… hope to bring back fun stories and lots of pictures!!
Also, I forgot to mention a fun story from before. Last week, during out bus tour, we saw the king.. yes the KING of Morocco… and when I say we was him, I mean he drove past our bus in his convertible and lots of “secret service” vehicles, but still! I was like 20 yards away from one of the last powerful monarchs in the entire world… woah