Our First Week

Well, A and I have successfully completed our first week of classes, and we're both extremely excited about the program here. Now that we're actually starting to settle into a  routine, I can tell you that our average morning goes something like this:

We get up (reluctantly) at about 6:30 in the morning, get dressed, and head upstairs where the man who runs our riad is preparing us a delicious breakfast of bread, jam, and mint tea laced with diabetes. Now that he knows we're studying Arabic, he loves talking to us in that language and teaching us occasional new words and phrases. Since the caffeine hasn't really kicked in yet, it's all we can do to keep up. When we finish eating, we head off to class.

It's about a 45-minute trip to the school, but after Ankara that feels like nothing. For those who are interested, the trip goes something like this: We leave our riad at about 7:30 and walk for about 10 minutes through the narrow, winding streets. There are no cars that deep in the medina, but motorcycles and bikes are both very popular and a little terrifying when they come barreling down the street behind you. That early in the morning, only a few people are out yet, and they all seem very surprised to see a pair of Americans out for a walk. Easily outnumbering the people are the stray cats, which seem to be everywhere. A keeps complaining that he hates not being allowed to pet them.

To be fair, they are really stinking cute.

Much of the medina is surrounded by a centuries-old wall that has numerous keyhole-shaped gates. We leave through one of them and are immediately plunged into the "modern" part of Rabat, complete with skyscrapers, a metro, multi-lane highways, and palm trees. I love the palm trees.

To get to the school, we could take a bus, a "petite taxi" (which runs like your average U.S. taxi), or a "grand taxi." We've done all three, but we think that the grand taxi offers the best combination of speed and affordability. To take one, we walk about 5 minutes to the nearest grand taxi station, which is essentially a parking lot with dozens of gray Mercedes Benzes. The are a number of drivers (all male) standing around waiting to make their next trip. We only need to say one word, "Souissi" (the neighborhood our school is in) and, after a bit of shouting back and forth, we're pointed in the general direction of a car headed that way. It usually takes asking a few more times before we're able to make it to our exact car and driver, but we always do in the end. Once 7 people are inside (the driver, two passengers up front with him, and four in the back) we take off. Somehow, that never takes more than a few minutes, and often only takes a few seconds, even when we seem to be the only ones looking for a taxi. It's really one of this country's great mysteries.

The seating is, of course, extremely cramped, but luckily it's a short drive. Plus, Moroccan men are generally chivalrous enough to have women sit by women whenever possible and, when it isn't, not to try anything "unseemly." The only time I have ever seen a Moroccan man acting inappropriately in a taxi (using the cramped space as an excuse to put his arm around a woman), the taxi driver stopped the car and ordered him to get out.

After a 10-15 minute drive, the driver stops to let us out. We're almost always let out a little before the spot he's "supposed" to take us, but getting to that spot takes some complicated - and time-consuming - traffic maneuvering that most drivers just don't want to do. Since we're paying about $0.60 each for the ride, we really aren't too picky about the customer service.

The 15 or so minute walk to our school couldn't be more different from the medina we just left. Souissi is one of the ritziest parts of Rabat, and for most of the walk there's a gorgeous park to our left and a row of embassies, as well as the occasional mansion, to our right. Before long, we arrive at our school which, let's just say, looks like it belongs in the area.

Because I'm studying the colloquial Moroccan dialect I was automatically placed in the beginning level. (I'll be talking about the dialect versus "traditional" Arabic in an upcoming post. For now, just let me say that the two are very, very, different.) I only have three other classmates: a 26-year-old man from Seattle who had, like me, studied some traditional Arabic before coming here; a 52-year-old French man who lives in Marrakesh but came here to learn to speak the dialect; and a 23-year-old female Fullbright scholar who is doing a research project with the U.S. Embassy here in Rabat.

The teacher is a very sweet Moroccan woman who speaks adequate English and excellent French. So, since all of us (except the student from Seattle) also speak French, we probably use English and French in equal proportions. While I feel badly for him sometimes, he doesn't seem particularly bothered by it and one of us always tries to translate for him. Personally, of course, I love it - it's like getting two languages for the price of one, especially because the teacher usually switches to French for more complex issues that she can't quite convey in English.

Anyway, my class moves very quickly, which is great by me. All of us have had a fair bit of exposure to Arabic, either through studying the "classical" language (me and the guy from Seattle) or from living extensively in Morocco (the other two.) Even so, the class is moving fast enough that we all have to really be on the ball to keep up. Just in the five days of class so far, we've learned:

• Basic introductory conversations (how to introduce ourselves, talk about our age, where we're from, why we're in Morocco, etc.)
• Days, months, and seasons
• Question words
• How to talk about our families
• How to talk about the weather
• How to talk about the time (much more complicated than you'd think)
• How to talk about our daily routines
• How to count to 999,999,999,999
• How to go shopping (including the names of lots of common items, how to talk about price, how to bargain, etc.)
• How to order food from a restaurant (including lots of food vocab)
• About 50 verbs (including many irregular verbs) and how to conjugate them in the past, present, and future tenses
• About 30 adjectives (including their masculine, feminine, and plural forms)
• Negation of verbs and adjectives
• Demonstrative adjectives and pronouns (this, that, these, those)
• Possessive pronouns
• The imperative (the verb form that gives commands, like "Eat" or "Go away!")
• Lots of general expressions, including many phrases so that we can conduct class in Arabic as much as possible (phrases like "How do you say....in Arabic" or "What does...mean," or "I don't understand...")

And that's the short list. So, again, it is a VERY intensive class. I absolutely love it, though, and the other students seem to appreciate it but also get frustrated sometimes (although much of what we're covering is completely new to me, the fact that I've studied "traditional" Arabic more than anyone else in there does often give me an edge.) Already, I'm being able to carry out basic conversations in Arabic with real, live Moroccans, which is incredibly exciting. The only sad thing is that, this being an embassy town, people in Rabat aren't nearly as impressed with seeing a foreigner who can speak a bit of their dialect as the people in, say, Meknes (the city we were in last summer) would be. So, I don't get quite the ego boost that I'd like...oh well. At this rate, I'll be debating 17th-century politics by the time this program is up. That'll show 'em!