My roommate shows up and the Americans go to Meknes

Man, I'm getting super good at typing on these French keyboards.

Classes didn't start for the Moroccan kids until Wednesday, so my roommate finally showed up on Tuesday night. As far as I can tell, her name is Saalma, but we American students are all having a really hard time pronouncing all the Moroccans' names. For example, one of our teachers is named Meriam, but the other one is Abdul-qlmksdjf something or other, which no one can say, so we just call him Usteth, which means teacher.

Anyway, my roommate is from Rabat (seemingly most people's roommates are) and one of the first things she told me is that she hates Ifrane because it is too small and the cafeteria here serves gross food. Well, I can assure you that the food here is a whole lot better than what we got in the dorms at Truman. Also, her boyfriend just left for the states to go to school at the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa?), so she really wants to go to America now. She speaks pretty good English, though, and I practised some French with her too, and a little bit of Arabic. I'm a polyglot now! For the most part we're not in the room much at the same time except at night. Sometimes she watches TV in English, so I watch too. There is a really popular soap opera here called Noor which is actually Turkish but is dubbed (poorly) into Arabic, and when she watches that I can sometimes pick out short phrases such as "thank you," "thank God," and "his name is Ali."

On Wednesday we had our "clubs," and I am in Calligraphy Club. We got special calligraphy pens (that we don't get to keep, so now I'll have to make a special trip to the marché because I want to take one home) and learned how to make half a dozen letters plus a word baab which means "door." On Thursday we watched a movie (it had English subtitles!) called "And the Language is the Land," about an exiled Palestinian poet name Mahmoud Darwich, who is supposed to be one of the most famous living Arabic poets. Before some of you start harrumphing about propoganda, let me say that, regardless of his politics, I really enjoyed his poetry, and I want to find a book of it translated into English now.

Today about fifty of us took a tour bus to Volubilis and Meknes. Volubilis is an ancient Roman town where they have been excavating the ruins. Our tour guide (an old Moroccan man with quite a sense of humor) told us it meant "Morning Glories," like the flower. You could still see the layout of all the houses, and some of the ones that had been excavated had really amazing tile floors. There were big roads, a huge Arc de Triumph-esque thing, lots and lots of columns ("Doric, Yonic, wa Crinthian" according to our guide), a sauna, olive press, aquarium, garden rooms, and even a vomitorium (our guide explained that the Romans ate and drank a lot and then threw it up, and that "in Germany, it is called Oktoberfest.") It was also super hot and sunny.

After that we went to Meknes and had lunch in a pretty fancy looking restaurant that seemed to only serve groups of old Europeans. It was tasty, though, and we had beef tagine. After lunch we went to the souk. They were going to let us wander around by ourselves, but we ran out of time, so we had to stay in a group as we walked through the souk (and let me assure you that fifty American students walking in a line makes quite a spectacle!) Meknes was much more like what I was expecting in Morocco, completely different from the modern AUI campus and tourist-oriented town of Ifrane (someone told me that in the summer, Ifrane will grow to 100,000 people, because the weather here is so nice). There were a lot of ginormous arched gates with super elabroate tiles and wood carvings. The souk itself was this maze of narrow streets all covered so it was cool and dark, with tiny shop after tiny shop, every other one selling those pointy-toed shoes. We went to the old medresa, which is a Qur'anic school, as well as the tomb of Moulay Ismail (he was a Moroccan king, and Meknes was the capital during his reign). He wanted to marry the daughter of Louis XIV, but she refused, and as compensation Louis XIV sent him four big clocks, which are still ticking away today.

Well, I've procrastinated on my homework enough now, so I will end it here. Tomorrow we are going to Fez, but independently, so we won't have to be in such large groups. After seeing the souk in Meknes, though, I can only hope we don't get horribly lost in Fez!

PS- for those of you with Facebook, some people have posted pictures and tagged me in them, so you might be able to find some pictures of Morocco if you look around. For those of you without Facebook, someone might help me get my pictures onto the internet sometime soonish. I'll probably put them on Flikr or something- I'll let you all know when that happens.

PPS- An Interesting Factoid: I was kind of annoyed that Arabic does not use what we call Arabic numerals, because it meant I had to learn all new numbers. But I just found out that what we know as Arabic numerals were actually developed in the Maghreb and migrated to Europe when the Moors conquered Spain, which is why we call them that. The "real" Arabic numerals we have to learn were developed in the Arab east through contact with India.

Interesting Factoid #2: In Arabic, al-Maghrib actually only refers to Morocco, which is how you say the country's name. I don't know what they call what we refer to as the Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Moorish Spain. I knew "Maghreb" meant "west," but it literally means "place where the sun sets."