Morocco Part 1

Hello everyone!! I just wanted to write quickly and say that I am in Rabat, Morocco and loving every minute so far! This place is really fascinating. We are finishing up orientation week right now, meaning that there is intense group bonding going on (between the two SIT Morocco programs, there are 45 people), lots of wandering the city trying to get our bearings, and lots of briefings and lectures from our program directors letting us know what to expect in terms of academics, getting us ready for our home stays, etc.

We actually meet our home stay families this afternoon, for which I am both very excited and very nervous. We have a tea reception as an opportunity to get to know them, and we move in with them tomorrow. It will be quite a change from the relative luxury of our hotel (which is already quite a change from the relative luxury of the U.S.), but I'm not sure what to expect. Some families have Western-style bathrooms and showers, while some have Turkish toilets and no showers. Some will give us our own bedrooms, some will not. No way to know until I get there tomorrow. BUT in any case, it's going to be great.

We've also started learning some Arabic (darija, the Moroccan form of Arabic) this week, and I successfully bartered for a pair of earrings in part-darija, part-English yesterday. Our hotel is just outside the medina, and our home stays will be IN the city, which is the old, labyrinthine part of Rabat. Think high walls, narrow and twisting passages, packed markets...it's quite the experience just to walk around, and living in the medina will be fascinating.

Our program is mostly girls, so we've certainly already been exposed to the street harrassment that I had been warned about. We had a seminar discussion about it yesterday, and I feel much better about it now that I understand its cultural implications (since males and females can't often meet in places like bars here, soliciting women's attention on the street is totally cultural acceptability, and often leads to dating and marriage). It's harmless, sometimes funny (they apparently like to quote American pop songs, although I haven't encountered this yet, mostly just "nicccccce" and "hello hello" type things), and sometimes annoying. But also interesting. I'm thinking about studying something related to this issue for my Independent Research Project at the end of the semester. Either that or the women's rights movements, focusing on the recent changes in family law--just a few years ago the current king made changes like upping the legal age of marriage for females to 18, making it easier for women to intitiate a divorce, removing the requirement that a woman get a male family member's permission in order to get married, etc. It's all very interesting, and plenty of women here are pushing for even more progressive changes. Another interesting issue is Western dress versus traditional Islamic dress. While traditional hijabs and djellabas (robes) are more common here in the old medina, you also see plenty of women in Western dress. Even more so outside of the medina, in the Ville Nouvelle and other newer neighborhoods.

There is so much more to say already, but I don't have unlimited time (we have wireless at our school but not much free time so far), so I'll stop here for now. Once I've been with my home stay family a few days, I'm sure I will have a zillion new observations to share and write about!! Thanks for reading, I miss everyone and I hope that Macalester, Milwaukee, Chicago, or wherever you may be is treating you well!