Friday-Sunday
Morocco is great. I finally can spell Morocco right without thinking about it. LOL. The Arabic language is getting easier to read but the vocabulary is still a bit heavy. At the beginning of this week we switched from Darija to Fus’ah. Fus’ah is standard Arabic, while Darija is a broken form of Arabic and French that is unique to Moroccans. It’s great being here. I am learning so much. This past weekend, myself and a few classmates (Maddie, Kathy, Sara, Kate, Marissa) went Fes. We stayed at Hotel Splendid. The hotel was nice, we had a swimming pool and we took advantage of it when the heat became overbearing.
Fes was the imperial capital under the Merenid, Wattasid and the Alouite dynasties while in Fez we toured the Old Medina and visited some interesting sights. We saw the famous leather sights that are in all the books; we visited a scarf factory and also a factory where beautiful brass, gold plated crafts were made. As a Muslim, I was also granted the opportunity to visit the Mosque within the Old Medina where the tomb of Medresa Bou Inania laid. It "weirded" me out a bit because people were in their kissing the tomb and in a sense giving the tomb of this human too much credit. What happened to Laillah Illah Allah?
I really didn’t enjoy Fes to be quite honest, but I definitely appreciate the experience of seeing another Medina. The Medina in Fes is dirty and rough. They are lots of donkeys and horses to scare me! Surprisingly a lot more cats than that of the Medina in Rabat, which is where I am living with my host family.
We ended our stay in Fes on Sunday and headed to Volubilis to see the remains of the Roman Empire. Some of the buildings there date back to B.C. while others were as early as A.D. The trip to Volubilis lasted about three hours, including the time it took us to argue with the Grand Taxi drivers. The Taxi drivers wanted to cheat us and charge us 100DH per person, when the real price 150DH per Taxi. It’s crazy out here in Morocco, when they think you’re from England or the states they do everything to rip you off. My attitude came out! I got very feisty and I made it clear to them that we knew they were cheating us and the most they were going to get was 250DH that is no tip included since they already added their tip. Volubilis was beautiful and so was Fez. We returned to Rabat Sunday around 5pm. I went to a concert by the Atlantic Ocean for an hour with some friends and returned home to catch some z’s.
June 22, 2009
Monday-
I got really sick, I was running a Temperature, I had a headache and body ached as well. I went to Arabic class but got to sick to make it to the culture seminars.
June 23, 2009
Tuesday-Feeling well enough to go to class and by the end of the night I had a headache. My head was hurting to bad, so I did most of my homework and left the rest ☹
June 24, 2009
Wednesday- woke up not feeling sick again but I forced myself to go to class. I am learning my way around the Medina very well. Today we discussed some detail about our southern excursion to Marrakesh and Essouira.
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