Home, sweet home.

Well. It seems like it's been forever, but we have our own home again! We've been really fortunate to live with amazing Moroccan families for home-stays, but it was time to get our own place.

Apartment hunting in Morocco is crazy. It actually made us miss the Craigslist days. YEAH. But our cousin, Anass, was absurdly helpful again, and it was easier for us than a lot of other volunteers. We looked at five places before finding the perfect one, and it's turned out to be wonderful. We are about a 3 minute walk from our host-family (and have already been back for couscous!) and about 10-15 minutes away from the Dar Chebab (this is all dependent on how hot it is and how many people we stop to say 'hi' to along the way).  We have a little Hanut that is two doors away and has all of our basic essentials, and we have a number more that are just a couple minutes down to road (up the hill really, just like everything in Taounate).

Here are some pictures! They're all from before we moved in, so you can't see our furniture collection. I'll do another post in the future once it's more furnished. Right now we have the basics (which we are more than happy about).

Details:
We have one floor of a three floor house. There are neighbors who live below us (a family with a mom, dad, and three kids), and the apartment above us is left vacant. Our landlord (mul dar) said that someone may move in, but it won't be for a year or so. We have access to the roof, and no one else in the building does. It's huge.
Our place is a large center room, three bedrooms, a salon (living room), a bathroom, a shower/laundry room, and a big ol' kitchen.
We use one bedroom for, well, sleeping, we use one for our sitting room (the salon is way to big for how much furniture we have right now), and one is pretty much just kept closed for the time being.
Here's our entry way and the center room area:

On the right is the salon, (moving to the left) is our front door, then the shower/laundry room (unseen), the bathroom, our bathroom sink area, and the door to the room that we mostly leave closed.

Here are two shots of our kitchen. It looks really sad when it's empty.

You may be wondering why there's a random hole in the wall in addition to a huge window? Everything in the kitchens here is run off of ButaGas (propane), so it's important to have as much ventilation impossible in case there is a leak. We've had multiple trainings on how to avoid leaks and have enlisted the help of someone who grew up with the tanks and has not died.

This is the room that is now our sitting room:

We've already added some furniture, but it's not done yet either. Don't fret! We have places to sit in the sitting room.

 Here's part of our shower/laundry room.

You'll notice the subtle difference in tile! This room and the bathroom are the only ones with different tile. We don't have a hot water heater yet, but we've both perfected the art of bucket baths, and they're just as nice. We have also yet to purchase a washing machine, so this is where we get our arm workouts in each week.

Finally, here's our bedroom.

We do, in fact, have a bed and things to hold our clothes and some decorations up... but it's still not complete!

We'll, this is our home (dar dyalna) for the next two years! I don't have a picture of our roof, but here's the view at sunset!