These are the pictures that I took on one Tuesday in November.  I wanted to document a day in my life here in Tetouan, but I didn't make it past 3 p.m., so I guess it's really just a morning in my life.  At any rate, it gives you a good idea of the non-job aspect of my life here.  My hope is that you will have a better idea what I am doing here in Morocco, what my surroundings and my routine look like.  Enjoy!

My laundry blowing in the morning breeze and the mountain that greets me every morning.  I always take a minute and look out the window when I wake up.  I can't help it.  The view never ceases to take my breath away!

After breakfast, Mary and I head out to our mosaic tiling class.  It's on the other side of town and through the old medina, so it can be a real adventure.

We usually pass through the main circle in town.  The flags are up to celebrate Independence Day, which was to be celebrated the week I took the picture (in November).  The building with the blue sign straight ahead is where I have my Arabic lessons, too!  On the other side you can see the post office and the Spanish consulate.  The cafe with the green canopy is one of Mary's favorites, and next to that you have the old yellow church (not picture).

A little bit further and you come to the entry into the old medina.  Go straight and you come to a lot of jewelery shops, go to the right and you will find nuts, live birds, delicious smoothies (including za3za3, which Mary and I call the Tetouani cocktail!), go to the left and find yourself in the King's palace (that is, if you could get past the guards!).  Mary and I went straight to make it to Bab Al Okla, the nearest exit to our school.

Inside the medina, we walk by little shops, produce and nut vendors, book stalls, fish mongers, hungry cats, butchers and bakers.  Mary stops to buy some delicious flat bread.  The baker was super creepy.  I took his picture, but he's too creepy and I don't want him on my blog!

Welcome to Dar Sana3, paradise in Morocco.  This is the building where mosaics is held, but the school is quite large, and has young apprentices studying all kinds of traditional Moroccan crafts, such as carpentry, metal (copper) work, embroidery and textiles, pottery, painting and more.  The interior courtyard, as you can see, is beautiful!  It's a beautiful garden with lovely mosaic work, a fountain, citrus trees and a vine-covered trestle.   

Me with my teacher, Ali, one of the nicest people I've met in Morocco.  We are in the tiling studio at Dar Sana3, where Ali teaches us new designs which we recreate using a protractor, ruler, pencil, pen and colored pencils.  It's interesting; the ruler is used mostly for drawing straight lines.  Most measuring is done with the protractor.  I have just about filled up my first notebook with designs!

After  class, Mary and I stop at our favorite bakery for a quick bite to eat.  I have a coffee and a small tuna sandwich.  Mary has a chicken pastry with her coffee.  The workers here are so nice and we know each other by name.  They always talk to us in Arabic about our day and and ask about our friends who also shop at the bakery. 

I can't talk long though, because I have to meet my teacher for my derija lesson.  We meet twice a week and I think I am making a lot of improvement.  My teacher is really smart, very patient, and he speaks Spanish which is a bonus.  Actually he is in Spain right now, so I have been meeting with another teacher at the school the past few weeks.
After class, I head home, grab some lunch and relax a little.  Then I do some lesson planning before going to work!

A while back I learned the Moroccan Arabic word for diarrhea, is-haal, and it has proven to be useful to me quite a few times.  It's a great word.  It comes from the Arabic word for "easy", presumably because when you have diarrhea, you don't have to work hard to do your business. 

Speaking of poop (and how often can one lead in with such a sentence!?), a few teachers at the ALC told me that roasted garlic, when taken as a suppository, is a great cure for is-haal.  I think I will stick with Imodium.  Or with the is-haal. 


Tomorrow I am heading to Rabat to spend the holidays with an old CLS friend that I met in Jordan.  I plan on cooking and baking and watching Christmas movies, although I am bringing my bathing suit too, just in case.  Don't be fooled: it's not traditional beach weather here.  But I hear people still surf with a wet suit, and I'm not opposed to giving it a try. 

I also have some big news: my little brother graduated from college!  It suddenly struck me today that now all 4 siblings are college grads.  Growing up, that seemed normal, inevitable.  But I realized that that's not true for a lot of people.  I'm glad I grew up with people who expected a lot out of me, who set high standards and then helped me reach them.  I'm also lucky to have such amazing and talented siblings.   Congratulations, Adam!  You did it!

Today I went for a hike with some friends.  We went up the mountain outside my window, the one that gives me great sunsets that infuse every corner of my house with specks of gold and ruby and amethyst.  The mountain that is often the first to greet me when I wake up in the morning.  The mountain that welcomes me when I come home from walks in the city, waiting in the lap of this Mediterranean valley like an overprotective parent.  Today, I climbed up this mountain and I sat on her shoulder and looked back at my home, or my house, or whatever it is that I have after living here for nearly three months.  I had to remind myself where I was, where I am.  I am in Morocco.  That tree over there is Moroccan.  Those goats are Moroccan.  I could accept where I was, but I suddenly couldn't remember how I got here.  Why am I here?  What events brought me to this place, this town, this mountain?  What am I doing here?  I ate a tangerine.  I ate another.  Life is good here.  I have made a lot of baby steps.  But now I think I am ready for more.  I'm ready to climb.

You will never go to bed without learning something new.  So true for me lately.  I'm learning so much here.  And re-learning things, too.  Here are a few things I have learned, and a few ones I have re-learned as well:

1. Teeth do not make good nutcrackers, and that includes pistachios (re-learned).
2. Pistachios are delicious (re-learned). Pistachio yogurt- even better (learned).
3. My boyfriend is a freaking genius (re-learned).
4. Missouri is spelled with two Ss and is not only next to Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma, but also Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee (re-learned, I guess...)
5. Avocados, when done in the right way, make a delicious dessert (learned).
6. Dessert is also spelled with two Ss.  But not desert (re-learned)
7. I could eat canned tuna just about every day of my life (learned)
8. Batman is in Turkey, and I am referring to the city and the country, respectively (learned).
9. Turkish and Arabic have many cognates (like the words for idea, minute, need, etc.) (learned)
10.  Maps don't work in Morocco. (learned)
11. Moroccan movie theaters are cultural "free-zones" and 'besos' are like popcorn - you enjoy them throughout the movie (learned... strictly through observation of course!)
12. Sheep intestines are fun to braid (learned)
13. Sheep can walk up stairs (learned)
14. Henna can be used to dye your hair in addition to decorating skin (re-learned, again through observation)
15. I love this film called "Elf", even after seeing it 4+ times (learned)
16. I like teaching 14 year olds, when they are nice and cute 14 year olds (learned)
17. Things can get lost in the mail. Forever. (learned, unfortunately)
18.  There are stars in squares and crosses in circles and squares in circles and circles in squares and all of this is made from intersecting lines coming from distant points.  (learned)
19. A compass can be used to measure distance. (learned)
20. The rules we say are not always the rules we teach. (learned)

I just realized that one of the hardest things about being in Morocco is the language ideologies.  It’s not like the US and Japan don’t have their fair share.  It’s just that in Morocco, there are a lot of languages about which to have an ideology.  My genuine love for all languages and my background in sociolinguistics make me extremely sensitive to these issues when they come up in conversation.  I can’t help it.  My reaction is both emotional and logical, coming with equal intensity from how I feel as from what I have read.  (Maybe because of that I don’t think people will ever really get it.)  It really drives me insane sometimes.  How can a well-educated, multilingual person tell me that “the Moroccan way of speaking” is so easy you just need to be around Moroccans to learn to speak it, and then tell me that the language has no rules?  Can you imagine trying to learn a language that had no rules???  Yeah, good luck learning that one.  It would be impossible.  What would you do?  Memorize endless amounts of dialogue and then recite them from memory when the occasion arose?  All languages have rules, people, even languages that lack the prestige or power to be called a language.  And that brings me to another big thing: one nation = one language = one big 19th century European nation-building propaganda.  The Spanish don’t own Spanish, the French don’t own French, and Americans aren’t rationed English as the only language they are allowed to speak with any authority.  Also, authority: native speakers aren’t the only ones who have it.  They don’t own the language either.  If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, then ask me.  Ask a librarian.  Think about it while you are standing on your head.  Because at the moment I feel like I am shouting the gospel truth in hell’s busiest intersection.  No one’s getting it, and no one’s really listening.  Repent! Repent! 

By the way, it is true that “the Moroccan way of speaking” is so easy that you just need to be around Moroccans to speak it.  Unfortunately, as in all the world’s languages, that offer only applies to learners between the ages of 1 and 13.  I guess we adults will just have to start memorizing…

  I think my brain has its own sick sense of humor, especially when it comes to learning languages.  Once, while trying to describe the rules of the game Freeze Tag to my dear Saudi friend, I accidentally replaced the word for “touch” with “lick” in Arabic.  I remember my friend’s expression as I described the neighborhood children running around trying to lick each other until the street lights came on.  Then there was the time that I accidentally said “sex” in Arabic instead of “body”.  The strange thing is I don’t think I had ever learned the word for sex before.  But my brain managed to put it together and have a good, long laugh at my expense, along with the rest of the people at Arabic club that day.  To be honest, I’m still not sure which is which.  I just try to avoid the topic.  My good friend Iyad would always tell me, “Alaina, whenever you make a mistake, it never comes out as nonsense.  You always manage to say another word with a completely different meaning!”  I have always chalked it up to Arabic’s enormous vocabulary.  It seemed to me that pretty much any sound combination possible had been assigned a meaning, an incredible feat considering the language has 7 distinct letters that to an English speaker all sound like t or d.  Lately, however, I have come to realize my brain has a much keener sense of humor than I do.  My theory is that it comes from that innate language ability that humans are born with.  During those rare moments when I let my guard down and I stop thinking about where the adjective goes and what tense the verb is in, great, creative, funny things come out.  The ice breaks and the person I’m talking to warms up a bit too.  It's like we are both being entertained by some third party.  And then I realize I am having so much fun, and it’s all coming, almost effortlessly, from somewhere inside me.  Somedays, it's good to be intermediate. 

I'm sick.  Again.  Last week it was a stomach flu.  This week, it's a swine flu.  Not THE swine flue, but a swine of a flu that has me coughing so badly my ribs hurt.  I went to the pharmacy and got some drugs, but the road to recovery has been a slow one.  I really hope I am not sick like this all winter.  I have plans that don't involve sleeping all day and do involve breathing normally. 

Fall weather has finally arrived, with charcoal gray skies, window-rattling winds and freak rain storms.  I kind of like this weather.  I like wearing a bunch of layers and drinking hot beverages all the time.  It feels good.  It reminds me of home!

Unless their head has been lobbed off.  Today is Eid Al Adha, or Eid Kabir, the Big Holiday, and I just got back from watching our neighbors sacrifice their lamb.  I first met this lamb a few weeks ago, when it's bleets came wafting into my living room.  The sheep had been living in the interior balcony of my building.  It was an open, loft-style apartment which it shared with another sheep.  I stopped by one day, just to see how the new tenants were adjusting to their life in the big city.  Both seemed to be happy, but to miss the open spaces and flock they had left behind. 

This morning, however, when I went down to their small loft apartment, I found the sheep lying in a pool of his own blood, with his head severed from his body.  It was neither murder nor suicide; it was sacrifice.  I am told he will make many tasty meals during the next couple months. 

BsSaha!

There are many reasons to celebrate the independence of a formally colonized country.  Tonight I am celebrating the part where I don't have to work tomorrow.  November really is a month of holidays in Morocco.  We celebrated the Green March two weeks ago, and next week is the two-day long Eid al Adha... great news if you like long weekends, bad news if you're a sheep.   I had plans to go to the movies with some friends tonight.  Really, I had planed to go to the MOVIE, singular, because there is only ever one movie showing at the main movie theater in town.  So, I had arrangements to meet a few friends for the late showing, after my night class let out.  At 9:45, I arrived at the movie theater only to find that there would be no 10 pm showing, because there were no people to watch it.  So we decided to try the other theater in town, just a short, walkable distance away, which was showing a Bollywood film.  I had never been to this other theater, but it has a reputation in town as being a place for lovers.  However, in my two previous experiences at the "good" theater, I would say most of the people there were much more interested in their companion than the movie, so I don't really understand why only one gets a scarlet letter.  In any case, we decided to check out the Bollywood movie (subtitled in Arabic... ) but alas, it too was closed.  So, what else is there to do at 10:00 on a Tuesday night in Tetouan?  Go home, do some yoga andpop open a bottle of wine in your pjs, and eat some Canadian chocolate that your roommate got in the mail today.  In the end, it's just as well.  I really shouldn't be spending a whole three dollars on a movie ticket right now anyway.

Despite my movie capers, today was a great day!  I had a great Arabic lesson in the morning, worked on some tile designs this afternoon, chatted with a friend over coffee and sweets, then headed home and had a great conversation with Koichi on Skype.  My class this evening went really well and I think everyone really enjoyed themselves, I met a coworker for a pizza and had a great, meaningful conversation, and then walked around town with some friends before finally coming home, where I had wine and chocolate waiting for me.  And best of all, tomorrow is a holiday, and I am going to Spain!  Let me say it again.  I am hopping a cab and traveling one hour to Spain tomorrow.  I can't even remember how many times in my life I have wished I could say that sentence.  Tomorrow, I am going to Spain. Me voy a España.  كنمشى ن اسبانيا  I wrote about it, wished for it, literally dreamed about it, and tomorrow, I'm gonna do it.  Wow.  Right now it seems like all dreams need is a little patience.  But, I think there is something more than patience.  So right now, I would like to give a pat on the back to myself last year, two years ago, three years ago, for making good decisions that allowed me to make my dreams come true, while at the same time making me think with hindsight that it had been easy.  And, I would like to thank the many people who helped me get here, like my loving family, my sister's cooking, my boyfriend, the cab driver tomorrow, the academy.  Come to think of it, there's lots to celebrate tomorrow.  Moroccan independence, no work, the realization of dreams, supportive friends and family, taco bake... so whatever day it is that you read this blog, declare this moment a personal holiday, and celebrate it any little way you can. 

Another week has gone by, and this one marked the halfway point in the fall term.  So, as I always do at midterm, I had my students write and reflect on their progress in the course.  I figure it's not a bad idea to take my own advice and write about my own goals and what I have done to achieve them thus far.

I gave myself a couple of goals before coming to Morocco.  Here they are:
1. Learn Derija (Moroccan Arabic)
2. Improve Fusha (Standard Arabic)
3. Memorize poems in English, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese
4. Do some volunteer work
5. Hike and/or exercise regularly
6. Develop teaching techniques
7. "Make new friends, but keep  the old ones..."
8. Read and write as much as possible
9. Learn some Tamazigh

To this original list, I have added a few more:
1. Develop an appreciation for Egyptian cinema
2. Develop a passive knowledge of French with the least amount of effort
3. Learn all I can about mosaic tiling
4. Learn about discipline without having to discipline

So far, I think I am pretty on target.  Except for learning derija.  I'm feeling pretty frustrated again.  I know I have learned a lot so far and made a lot of progress, but the past few days I have been feeling pretty defeated.  I mean, aside from my Arabic teacher and my mosaic tiling teacher, no one even speaks to me in derija.  They prefer to speak to me in Spanish, or in crappy French which I don't even speak, or sometimes English.  It's like I'm trying so hard, but the other person in the conversation isn't trying at all.  Sometimes it hurts my feelings, sometimes I find it just insulting.  And after so much of it, it really starts to hurt my motivation.  Why should i even bother to try ?  I know it's the normal ups, downs and plateaus of language learning, but from where I am now, it looks like a loooong way to the top.