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Hello all!
Sorry it's taken me a bit to write my first post (my computer was in Egypt up until a few days ago) but now we are here and getting settled and starting our Moroccan lives (although the rest of our stuff is still sitting at Alexandria University. Looks like we'll be wearing the same jeans for quite a long time!)
So first things first:
We made it here after a long long trip from our various cities in the US -> Washington Dc -> Paris -> Rabat -> Ifrane.
Ifrane, Morocco is a teeny little ski and university town in the Middle Atlas Mountains. We are at about 5000 feet and it is cold, but beautiful! We are enrolled at Al Akhawayn University, a university started in 1995 and named "The Two Brothers" after King Hassan II and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia (not actually brothers). The story goes that King Fahd donated a large sum of money to Morocco intended to help clean up a giant oil spill of the coast of Morocco. However, the currents changed and the oil never reached Moroccan shores, and apparently you cannot return a royal gift, so King Hassan II allocated the funds to open a semi-private, semi-public university that runs off the model of American universities. The result: A Moroccan university whose buildings look like Switzerland (aside from the giant mosque in the middle), American style teaching, and international students. Wild, right?
There are about 1,300 students here who all speak a combination of French, Moroccan Arabic, and English. They are generally of the upper upper class of Moroccan society (nice cars, clothes, sunglasses) and I was told that most of them have some sort of connection to the royal family or government ministers (it's a real hoity toity bunch), but we're trying to breach the language divide and start making some friends (although Moroccan Arabic?! REALLY different than Egyptian and sounds a lot like French). And people think we sound like movie stars when we speak Egyptian, because they know know Egyptian Arabic from the movies. So we confuse a lot of people, in addition to the really troubling fact that they all think we are government spies, or at least spies in training.
Our program:
The administration decided that we should compensate cultural immersion with school and class time. So we are working our freezing little tushies off. We are taking Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian cinema, translation, and Islamic studies and are also enrolled in 1 of 3 classes at the university (Arabic media, Islamic civilization, or Arab history) (I'm taking Arabic media). On the weekends, we have planned excursions to Moroccan cities, to help give us a taste of actual Morocco, since our university is not exactly an accurate representation.
Thankfully 2 of our very favorite teachers, Ustatha Radwa and Ustath Abdu Salam, flew all the way from Egypt to come and teach us! This was a harder feat than you can possibly imagine for several reasons. Radwa was extremely invested and involved in the revolution and rebuilding Egypt's future and literally was involved in shaping Egypt's education system and Mohamed Abdu Salam had to drag his whole family (2 babies aged 16 months and 5 years) all the way here, plan our whole new curriculum, pack up all of our stuff from our apartments, and tie all of our loose ends in Egypt. Also, the bureaucracy involved in attaining visas and working with the sort of non-existent Egyptian government and banks is no simple task. To say the least, we couldn't be more grateful to have them here. They are remarkable human beings.
So despite all the challenges, we are persevering and trying to stay positive and study hard!
Now, a few bits of fun.
When we manage to get our noses out of our books, we do find some fun adventures.
Last Saturday, a few friends and I decide to explore the giant woods around our campus and go for a little hike. The scenery was amazing, we found some interesting plant life, spent about 10 minutes examining a dead fox to try and figure out how it died, and practiced taking pictures on Mae's new fancy camera.
Then Sunday, we took a trip up to a little town called Azrou. The drive was spectacular. The mountains look just like southern Spain, with rolling green hills, sheep and cows lining the countryside, and Moroccan women in colorful abayas pushing donkey carts and carrying baskets of bread. When we got to Azrou, we grabbed a quick lunch a went straight to the monkey forest. At first, we couldn't find the monkeys, so we wandered in a Narnia like forest with thousand-year-old, tall cedars, and tried yelling out in Arabic to find the monkeys.
And eventually, we did.
We saw babies and mommies and grandpas, and fed them bananas and clementines and they took them from our hands, and it was the best day ever! They were so cute and funny and playful and jumped between all the branches, and I decided that I should drop out of the program to become a zoologist so that I can study monkeys all day long (either that or marine biology so I can scuba dive). After about 2 ours of watching them and taking about 4000 pictures each, we dragged ourselves away and went back to school.
P.S My camera cord is still in Egypt so all of my photos are courtesy of Katelyn Gallagher
Sorry it's taken me a bit to write my first post (my computer was in Egypt up until a few days ago) but now we are here and getting settled and starting our Moroccan lives (although the rest of our stuff is still sitting at Alexandria University. Looks like we'll be wearing the same jeans for quite a long time!)
So first things first:
We made it here after a long long trip from our various cities in the US -> Washington Dc -> Paris -> Rabat -> Ifrane.
Ifrane, Morocco is a teeny little ski and university town in the Middle Atlas Mountains. We are at about 5000 feet and it is cold, but beautiful! We are enrolled at Al Akhawayn University, a university started in 1995 and named "The Two Brothers" after King Hassan II and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia (not actually brothers). The story goes that King Fahd donated a large sum of money to Morocco intended to help clean up a giant oil spill of the coast of Morocco. However, the currents changed and the oil never reached Moroccan shores, and apparently you cannot return a royal gift, so King Hassan II allocated the funds to open a semi-private, semi-public university that runs off the model of American universities. The result: A Moroccan university whose buildings look like Switzerland (aside from the giant mosque in the middle), American style teaching, and international students. Wild, right?
There are about 1,300 students here who all speak a combination of French, Moroccan Arabic, and English. They are generally of the upper upper class of Moroccan society (nice cars, clothes, sunglasses) and I was told that most of them have some sort of connection to the royal family or government ministers (it's a real hoity toity bunch), but we're trying to breach the language divide and start making some friends (although Moroccan Arabic?! REALLY different than Egyptian and sounds a lot like French). And people think we sound like movie stars when we speak Egyptian, because they know know Egyptian Arabic from the movies. So we confuse a lot of people, in addition to the really troubling fact that they all think we are government spies, or at least spies in training.
Our program:
The administration decided that we should compensate cultural immersion with school and class time. So we are working our freezing little tushies off. We are taking Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian cinema, translation, and Islamic studies and are also enrolled in 1 of 3 classes at the university (Arabic media, Islamic civilization, or Arab history) (I'm taking Arabic media). On the weekends, we have planned excursions to Moroccan cities, to help give us a taste of actual Morocco, since our university is not exactly an accurate representation.
Thankfully 2 of our very favorite teachers, Ustatha Radwa and Ustath Abdu Salam, flew all the way from Egypt to come and teach us! This was a harder feat than you can possibly imagine for several reasons. Radwa was extremely invested and involved in the revolution and rebuilding Egypt's future and literally was involved in shaping Egypt's education system and Mohamed Abdu Salam had to drag his whole family (2 babies aged 16 months and 5 years) all the way here, plan our whole new curriculum, pack up all of our stuff from our apartments, and tie all of our loose ends in Egypt. Also, the bureaucracy involved in attaining visas and working with the sort of non-existent Egyptian government and banks is no simple task. To say the least, we couldn't be more grateful to have them here. They are remarkable human beings.
So despite all the challenges, we are persevering and trying to stay positive and study hard!
Now, a few bits of fun.
When we manage to get our noses out of our books, we do find some fun adventures.
Last Saturday, a few friends and I decide to explore the giant woods around our campus and go for a little hike. The scenery was amazing, we found some interesting plant life, spent about 10 minutes examining a dead fox to try and figure out how it died, and practiced taking pictures on Mae's new fancy camera.
Then Sunday, we took a trip up to a little town called Azrou. The drive was spectacular. The mountains look just like southern Spain, with rolling green hills, sheep and cows lining the countryside, and Moroccan women in colorful abayas pushing donkey carts and carrying baskets of bread. When we got to Azrou, we grabbed a quick lunch a went straight to the monkey forest. At first, we couldn't find the monkeys, so we wandered in a Narnia like forest with thousand-year-old, tall cedars, and tried yelling out in Arabic to find the monkeys.
And eventually, we did.
We saw babies and mommies and grandpas, and fed them bananas and clementines and they took them from our hands, and it was the best day ever! They were so cute and funny and playful and jumped between all the branches, and I decided that I should drop out of the program to become a zoologist so that I can study monkeys all day long (either that or marine biology so I can scuba dive). After about 2 ours of watching them and taking about 4000 pictures each, we dragged ourselves away and went back to school.
P.S My camera cord is still in Egypt so all of my photos are courtesy of Katelyn Gallagher
nice to have a new blog to read!
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