turning 20 in morocco was pretty fun, we had a picnic with extended family and they sang happy birthday to me in french, arabic, and english. last night we went to the local music concert(s) that are going on at 11pm all week. taking a cab was... an adventure and if we do that again we'll probably just spend the night in the medina. kate (my roommate, also a rising junior at wake) and i felt pretty uncomfortable until we met up with the other 3 guys on the trip, but once we were all together it was fine.
we get by mostly in french, which is nice because i can tell mine has already improved/been refreshed. most moroccans start learning french in the second grade and it's the widely used lingua franca here. derija is the colloquial arabic, which is rather different from MSA, but MSA (very close to Egyptian Arabic) is also fairly understood.
my host family is great, there's a son who's 16, and two daughters, 18 and 9 (i thought the 16 and 18 year olds were more like 12, which was confusing). no one in the family exceeds about 5 foot 3 at the most, so i feel like a giant, especially with 6 or 7 of us crowded around the dinner table in the kitchen.
speaking of which, the eating setup is quite interesting. we share just a couple cups for water, and often eat with forks/spoons from a communal serving bowl in the middle of the table. oh and we realized about 24 hours in that we've been drinking tap water from refilled water bottles. which would be fine but they also served us well water on the picnic yesterday. not so sure about that... it's so hot here that you have to drink water constantly, so if you restrict yourself to bottled water, there's a good chance you could get severely dehydrated and run into other not so fun problems. hopefully our bodies will adjust to the water without too much excitement.
headed to pick up a bite to eat and get school supplies (better pens/paper for writing arabic, etc)... a bientot!
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