Next steps

It's hard to believe, but this is our final week with our home stay for our CBT. We've had over two months of language classes for seven hours a day, six days a week, followed by living with non-English speaking families. It's been difficult at times, sure, especially when you can't make a simple sentence or remember how to say "soon," but it's been an amazing experience. Our language is a million times better because of this family, but so are our charades skills. Also, we've been told that we're officially a part of this family and they expect us to visit as soon as we can. (This is straight from Ali, our delightfully mustached host dad.)

We'll spend this final week learning a few more key sets of vocab and practicing our verbal "skills" before we go to Rabat for the final weekend of our training. We'll be in Rabat for about five action-packed days. There will be opportunities for medical stuff and more Internet than we've had in a while, yeah, but some other slightly more important things, too. One day will be dedicated to our Language Proficiency Interview, where we get to show off what we've learned since we got here and brag about how great our LCF is. All volunteers are expected to hit a certain level of proficiency before being sworn in, so here's hoping for the best on that one. Then on April 1st, we swear in as official Peace Corps Volunteers, Insha'Allah, with the other 94 Trainees, including 16 couples, and the oldest person to ever serve in Peace Corps (she's 86 right now). We have heard that there will be people from the Embassy there including the US Ambassador to Morocco as well as representatives from the Moroccan Ministry of Youth and Sports. Then, April 2, we up and move to our new home for two years. Boom. (Okay we move in with a host family that we'll live with for a month before we actually go to the home that we'll have for two years, but you get the point)

A few information tidbits for anyone with FAQs:

We cannot leave our sites for the first three months. Not on the weekends, not if a friend is visiting Morocco, not if we run out of cheese, nada. 

We'll probably get a mailing address within the first few weeks of moving, and we will be happy to share it with anyone who asks! (Please ask. I love mail. I'm also a great penpal and can hook you up with a solid postcard.)

No, we still don't know exactly what our schedule will be like in Taounate. It really depends on what the community needs.it is likely that we'll be teaching a few levels of English and some other stuff, but we don't know the other stuff yet. 

Most of Morocco seems to be split between Barcelona and Real Madrid for their football (kura) teams, and I think we're joining the Barcelona crowd. (This is probably the most important point on the list.)

And finally, here's a picture of us on one of the many hills in Taounate. 

Our last day of CBT

A rooftop view of Taounate 

Update from Taounate

1. This is a big town. City? Yeah let's go with city. The Internet says there are around 32,000 people here, but it feels bigger than that. It's really spread out over a few small peaks of some small peaks in the Rif Mountains. 

2. Our Dar Chebab is amazing. It was just opened in 2010 and they have a lot of resources and an eager staff. 

It's two stories. Biggest Dar Chebab we've seen yet. 

No but seriously. 

There are about 10 PlayStations in this room. They're all in good condition and it would seem this could be an ideal method of sharing American culture. Right?

Here's the computer language lab. YEAH. The last volunteer built this lab with like 10 computers that are all equipped with Rosetta Stone and all the equipment necessary. (Thanks, David!)

We've been a couple times and met with the staff and are very eager to get started with teaching English, aerobics, sports, chess, and anything else that presents itself. 

3. Funny thing that's totally worthy of being a thing on this list: our Mudira (boss lady at the DC) speaks German. For everyone who said that Toby's German would be worthless and Alexis' French would be the only thing helpful, feel free to openly laugh along with us here. It's awesome. 

4. Host Family #2: glorious humans. We have Mama Fatima, Karim, Ikram, Najwa, and a bunch of people who live close by and seem to stop in a lot. They all love Peace Corps and all the volunteers that they've met in the past and we love them. 

Bonus: there are a couple cats who mosey in and out of the house throughout the day. 

5. The weather. It turns out we're kind of in the Portland of Morocco. It's really green, we have fir trees, and they get a loooot of rain. It's awesome. 

More town pictures later, but here's the view from our house:

A few definitions

1. Juice: would be known to our American readers as squeezed fruit, but is actually something similar to a smoothie. Juice in Morocco is made in a blender with plenty of fruit, sometimes yogurt, definitely milk, and likely sugar. Zero ice. It's always delicious, and it's shocking how many things have juice (avocado juice, for instance, is delightful). At first, it was easy to laugh it off as crazy, but then the idea of cranberry juice cocktail came to mind, and we realized that juice is a pretty fluidly defined word. Bonus: the verb for "to juice" in Darija is the same as "to wring out"

2. Salad- alright American pals, before you scoff at the following, take a second to thing about the dressing you last enjoyed on a salad. Host Family #1 makes a delightful dish of romaine, orange bits, and sugar. They also have others of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, or a pasta salad situation, but they realized that I liked the romaine combo, so it's the more frequent dish. 

3. To have a cold- this is something that seems to be similar everywhere, but expressed in different ways. Right now, Toby is getting over a cold. HF1 has determined that the cause of it was that it was a little cold in Meknes or Fes last week. Alexis is right in the middle of a cold, and it's been decided that the cause was a small sunburn from a sunny day this weekend. It has nothing to do with the way we hang out sometimes (literally all of the time). Again, it seems funny at first, but then we remembered warnings from grandmothers about how not wearing a hat can also cause a cold, or not swimming after a meal means something. 

It turns out, people are funny and well-intentioned and awesome everywhere. 

Off to Taounate

Today we leave for almost a week with Host Family #2 in Taounate. For those of you who are our active followers (come on, there's got to be one person out there, right? Parents?), I hope you've been looking up more about the town. We've heard a lot of good things and hope to expand soon and provide pictures!

Taounate, Morocco

That'll be our new home for the next two years!

We get a chance to visit next week, so expect more exciting information then. (And a potential mailing address)

A weekend in Fes

As a part of our Cultural Based Training, we spend the majority of our time in the little town we've been assigned to. That way, we can really work on our language and integrating into our host-families. However! We do occasionally get a chance to go out and explore other parts of Morocco. We have two of these weekends during the three months that we're in CBT, and this was our second. (We spent the first doing our taxes and laundry, as one does)

Saturday afternoon, we packed up and headed to Fes. 

Fes is just as amazing as expected. We spent the majority of our time in the Old Medina, which is just a series of windy paths that are some how all interconnected and filled with people and clothes and food and electronics and rugs and everything else you could imagine. 

One of the highlights was the tanneries. It was also definitely the smelliest part, but gorgeous. The only way to see them is to go into one of the leather stores that overlooks the actual work area, so there are tons of store owners trying to pull you into their shops for a pretty long stretch of medina. We found one store that wasn't trying too hard to pull people in, so we went there. In addition to a great view, we were shown to the roof by the store owner's 9 year old son named Mohammed who could speak Arabic, English, German, French, and probably a few words of other languages, too. He handed us stalks of mint leaves to avoid the terrible smell and told us a little bit about what we were seeing. We also go to try out a bit of our Arabic on him, and he was entertained, to say the least.  I think we were nearly as impressed with him as we were with the tanneries...

We also found time to see the gates to the Royal Palace of Fes and the big ol' Western style mall, though they were much shorter trips.