Allison week 5 Morocco

That’s cool Tyler’s starting school and you got a cat! It’s crazy to think school starts in two weeks! 

It was a really good week. On Tuesday we went to a Moroccan orphanage to plant bushes and play with some of the kids there. 

We want lazer tagging as a group and had traditional Moroccan dance class. 

I’ve had a lot of fun spending time with my host family this week. Yesterday I went to the Medina on my own to pick up sprinkles, melting chocolate and Philadelphia cream cheese for the cake pops me and my host sister were making. I was surprised I was able to find it all. Shopping in the Medina as an American is a lot like a mix between a scavenger hunt, a corn maze and charades. I did get to practice my Arabic a lot asking shopkeepers where things were and trying to bargain. 

See you in a week!

Friends

Allison week 4 Morocco

It’s been a pretty busy week. We just got back from our trip to the Sahara Desert! It was awesome! We rode camels for about an hour out into the desert to get to camp and we slept out under the stars. I was surprised that I didn’t get too sunburned. The sand dunes were way taller than I was expecting. 

 

We also made stops to see monkeys, we talked to a random shepherd in the Atlas Mountains and looked at his sheep, and on the way back we went to Ifran which is supposed to be the Switzerland of Morocco. 

 

We got to go to a refugee center after school one day this week and we practiced English with the refugees there. The refugees me and another girl in my class named Hanan talked to were from Mali. They were super nice and it was really fun to help out in their class. They are going to school in Rabat and when I asked what they wanted to do when they got out of school, one said he wanted to be the foreign minister of Mali and the other said he wanted to be the president. 

It’s funny how tailored our Arabic skills are for the foreign service. The third vocabulary word we learned was United Nations.  After school one day they asked us to get in groups and write a story in Arabic. Our group wrote about a hungry dog named Bob who goes to the store to buy food. Bob the hungry dog also happens to work for the United Nations and is a translator specializing in the Middle East.

Atlantic meets Pacific, where clay mixed, Chefchauen

Allison week 3 in Morocco

It was a really great week. We just got back from a weekend trip to Tangier and Chefchauen. It was really pretty in both cities. We got to got to the straight of Gibraltar and we could see Spain on the other side. We had really cool tours of both cities. We went on a hike in the mountains near  Chefchauen. 

It’s been fun being here in Morocco during the World Cup. A lot of Moroccans were really excited that France won and in all of the shops and cafes we walked by in Chefchauen today, people were just watching the game. 

We took our midterm on Friday and it wasn’t too bad. I just hope I spelled everything right in the essay portion. 

We also got to go to an area outside Rabat where they make traditional Moroccan pottery. It was really cool to see the similarities between how they do pottery here and in my ceramics class at home. 

That’s too bad Dad doesn’t get to got to Utah for as long. I hope you guys have lots of fun! Have a great week!

Allison week 2 Morocco

I had a great week, sorry to not check my email sooner. It’s been really busy. We just got back from a weekend trip to Casablanca and Marrakesh. 

Classes were really good this week. Now we can conjugate verbs in the present and past tenses! We’ll have our mid-term exam on Friday so I’ll have to make sure to get a lot of studying done this week.

Our school days are pretty interesting because we have a lot of breaks in the middle of the day. 

8:00-10:00 classes

10:00-10:30 tea break

10:30- 12:00 classes

12:00-2:00 lunch and study time

2:00-3:00 afternoon classes

3:00-6:00 extra activities like cooking club or conversation practice with Moroccans

They feed us so much! My host family likes that I eat their food though. Me and my host sister have done a lot of cooking together and I learned how to make cake and chicken the Moroccan way. 

I got to go to the market in Rabat on Friday and it was so cool! I live in Agdal which is the nicer area of the city where everything is really western so it was cool to see the Medina because it feels so different from America. It’s super crowded and the streets are really narrow. I got to go inside one of the other student’s host family’s house in the Medina and it had all tile mosaic walls and a courtyard in the middle of the house. It was fun to see more traditional Moroccan architecture. 

We only spent a couple of hours in Casablanca but we got to go in the Hassan 2 mosque which is the 3rd biggest in the world and is built on the ocean. Marrakesh was super hot but the market there was huge! We had a guided tour then got to explore the souk. Marrakesh has a lot of European tourists so the shopkeepers all know a few English phrases and shout at you to buy stuff with English accents. It was a really fun trip.