Mondays...

Jaye and Quinn are going to France?! Ugh I’m soo jealous! Can I commmmme?!?! PS why can’t you go for Christmas when I’ll be there too?!?! At least you’ll get to see Hanne... that will be so great you two are just the most adorable twosome. I miss you both very much!

So the general story of my life in Morocco always revolves around cloudiness. Everything is so unclear! The lecture series of this program (which is pretty much every afternoon) is usually led by our two “professors” who both are brilliant and their English is actually perfect. Their wording is excellent and even Americanized given they both studied in the US for years. I never catch incorrect grammar; BUT, their accents are nonetheless distracting. Especially day after day. And we also have guest lecturers that come in quite often as well. Twice we’ve had this man who is obviously a genius and renowned political scientist and has even worked in the US congress… but I can’t understand so much of what he says! I mean he too speaks impeccable English, but that has turned out to be not nearly as important as clarity when it comes to lectures. If he awkwardly said “the governments has control total” it would not make grammatical sense but I would still comprehend the concept behind the sentence, but instead it comes out more like “da guvnment haad tootil contrl” and that takes more than a second to sink into my mind and at that point he’s already said two more incomprehensible sentences. Today it literally took me 20 minutes and probably 25 times to understand “mutool” was “mutual.” I mean I’m sure I’ll eventually get much more used to it but I admit today when we had two American men from the American embassy come lecture it was incredibly refreshing.

Annnnnd… then there’s Arabic class (uggggghhhhhh) Well let me start by saying I’ve learned the alphabet enough so that I can read Arabic which 2 weeks ago I would have thought totally impossible. But then we get into this whole concept of vocabulary which I have practically none. Today, after two weeks I just figured out that what I thought we were learning as verbs and their conjugations were more accurately just pronouns connected to nouns (and yes that took 2 weeks to get to just to clarify the difficulty and difference in this language). I just feel so defeated and overwhelmed after each 3 hour class every day. Yeessss 3 hours every day all in Arabic because my teacher doesn’t speak English at all, (which if she did could have explained 2 weeks ago what we were actually learning…) and although she and most people in my class speak French, it’s really unfair for me and the other few who don’t speak French when she explains in that language so she tries hard to use French as little as possible. The one upside I suppose I could kind of legitimize at this point is that the language and the letters are really pretty and fun to write! And I can write my name! But forget actually speaking the language…hopefully that comes in a few months—at least after 90 hours I sure hope I’ll have some communication skills! (To be put into perspective, at Oxy you usually take 3-4 hours a week for each class, and I take 3 hours a day of Arabic) BLEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHHHAKFAKNFDNKCIpewiojfddnkfeiuvsdnk.