Abi Aston in Morocco

Finally, I’m here!!  I arrived last Saturday after a fairly uneventful journey.  There was an incident with the luggage belt, getting lost in arrivals, a near collision in the car park, and avoiding a man trying to cycle across the motorway whilst precariously balancing a water container.  But, it was actually a very easy journey and I was collected from the airport by a very friendly Northern Irish couple who are working with the same charity as me.

YUMmy Moroccan lentil soup

It has been a week of exploring and orientating myself with Rabat, getting to know my new housemate and starting language lessons.  I have had a week of Moroccan Arabic lessons and I felt like my head was exploding by day two.  Thankfully on day three, I gained a classmate which has been great although she has been here for two years and is picking up the language a wee bit faster than me.  Eeek.   Amusingly, my teacher is using the immersion technique (we’re not allowed to speak English in the lesson), so if I misunderstand the meaning of a word and then try to use it in a different sentence, it leads to a lot of giggling.  I am currently surrounded by 20 mini posters that summarise what I was taught this week and therefore need to know by Monday.  I have been doing at least three hours homework every night and I was shattered by last night.  So far, my attempts to use the language in real life haven’t been entirely successful, but I’m hoping that by the end of next week, I’ll be more coherent!

My housemate for these first few weeks is an American nurse called Kristen who is doing an internship at the local hospital.  We have had a fun week together cooking, singing, dancing, and chatting for hours about our observations and experiences of life, love and Morocco.  It is surprising how often we don’t understand each other because our English vocabulary and accents are so different.  We reached a key moment on Friday when they only way I could explain what I was talking about was by using a word that we both knew in Moroccan Arabic!!  Classic.

There’s so much to say but I’d better sign off now

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.