Travel Plans = Cancelled

Upon hearing that all trains to Tangier were canceled this morning, I am actually quite happy that I dropped my plans to got to mountainous Chefchouan in the northern part of the country.  It has been raining almost non-stop in Morocco for the past week, and with the unreliability of the roads and trains, I figured I'd pass on that venture for now at least.  I definitely plan on going to Chefchouan for one of my free weekends, but not this one!  So what to do this weekend? Explore Rabat's surroundings! There is apparently a zoo and garden to the north of Sale, Kenitra--a 30 minute train ride away--supposedly has a fantastic beach and is a very nice smaller city, and there is always more to see in the city of Rabat itself, considering I have only really been in a small part of the Nouvelle Ville and mostly in the Medina.  So it's time to be a tourist in my "home town" and surroundings!

An integral part of my weekend plans will also be studying Arabic.  Since we started learning Fus'ha in class this past week, we have covered the Alphabet and basic vowels, but while it is nice that Arabic has a separate letter for each sound, it is extremely frustrating to try to find a coordinating sound in English or Latin script.  My only options were to remember the sound (not really an option) or try to write down some strange and most likely not accepted transliteration of what they sound like to me.  I have been ok with sounds like "a", "f", "g", and "s" but when it comes to what my professor calls the stronger letters, things can get a little hairy.  So for the past week I have been making a fool of myself in front of my family as I attempt to mimic their pronunciation and how they write each letter.  It makes me feel like a child all over again, despite the fact that I'm 20. I have seen some of the fruits of my labor, however, because when I look at Arabic words spelled on an orange juice bottle, for instance, they no longer look like just a bunch of squiggles and lines with dots, they actually look like letters and sounds.  Just a little bit more effort and I might be able to read. 

Another one of the uniquely Moroccan encounters I have had to deal with lately was a different form of harassment.  As I was walking home from belly dance class with my sister, Amal, this one man started saying something very extensive in Darija, and after a bit, Amal turned around and started saying something back to him.  At first I thought she was just giving him a taste of his own medicine, but I noticed that she never got that upset about harassment before.  I asked her what he had said, and she slowly replied in mixed French that he had called me a U.S. spy that her family took into her home so that I could take all of the secrets of Morocco back to my government.  While I had been warned that people might say this upon seeing hordes of foreigners in the Medina, I had not expected that I would actually be accused of being a spy.  While not extremely disturbing, it was definitely a moment that made me stop and realize how foreign I can seem to some people.  Homestays are a relatively strange concept when you think about it: going to a country and staying with someone you have never met so that you can study their culture.  It makes sense to me as an anthropologist, but that's only the emic perspective; I need to think outside of my ethnic box.