Real World, Fes edition

I finally got my luggage back. Yey! I can now officially think about other things.

Classes started last Monday and they have been quite intense. It’s four hours everyday with homework, which you can finish, so far at least, in about two hours or less. I’m repeating some of what I already learned at Harvard so it’s more of reinforcement and practice rather than learning something completely new – which is great, because the one-year gap had made me almost forget everything. But things are becoming more clear now. In fact, my lack of French language skills and of the local Arabic dialect (they call it darija) is a very helpful motivation in forcing me to learn the standard one, particularly to use it in everyday conversation.

The one place I cannot use it in though is where I stay. The ALIF residence is a villa located right across the school which currently houses nineteen students, all of whom save for two are American citizens. All of us go to U.S. universities. And since we are all on different levels of Arabic, we can  only speak English around each other. So far, it has been great, the one silver lining when I was worried about my luggage and I found so many eager and genuine offers to help. Also, I’m glad I am not the oldest though I am definitely one of the old-er students. More importantly, I am not the only Asian (yey!), either both here in the residence or in the school. I’ve seen three Chinese-Americans enrolled for the summer.

Thanks to the spate of revolutions and uprisings around the Arab world, there are more than a hundred and fifty students registered to learn Arabic  here in ALIF Morocco. Harvard, for instance, does not give funding or credit if one wants to go to Syria or Jordan. Besides the nineteen of us, the rest are staying either in apartments or doing homestays with local Moroccan families. A Summer Arabic program at the Virginia Military Institute has 70 college kids here all learning Arabic. My Palestinian-American friend remarked that it seems scary all of them either wants to or is required to learn Arabic, i.e. where else in the Arab world is the U.S. military going to be engaged in? Speaking of the military, one of our housemates here is a former Army guy who just finished an MBA at Harvard last week. And he said he wants to learn Arabic to do business in the region in the near future. He’s also quite arrogant.

For food – regular lunch so far has either been McDonalds chicken nuggets, chicken tagines (stewed chicken with vegetables in a claypot), and roasted chicken with potatoes. Good thing I actually like chicken. There’s a lot of them here, and very cheap too. Generally though – schedule is quite tight – I have the worst schedule since I have a six-hour break in between classes which means I can’t really just slack off after 10am because psychologically I know I have an upcoming class in the afternoon. And since there are a ton of homework, we really can’t go far during the weekdays. The only option then is to reserve all fun out-of-town trips for the next couple of weekends.

There are two upcoming birthdays here – mine which is tomorrow and Sam’s, a Notre Dame college senior on Monday and we will be having a joint party on Saturday night. One of the girls here is planning to do our own roast chicken in the oven and we will be having pasta and cake with it. I will write about that on Saturday.