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Mohammed V Airport
It took one girl a long time to get through customs so a group of us posted up outside of Moroccan Duty Free. Pretty classic OMG pic. Yeah I travel in style and sleep well at the same time! Time flies when you're having fun and blog posts are slow to catch up. I will post this in three parts for those of you afraid of long paragraphs of text.
The trip got off to a great start. Saturday, my dad and I drove to New York for a 8:00 flight out of JFK. It was a nice weather for the drive and I made the bad idea of sleeping for most of it. I got to JFK with plenty of time. As I went through the check point and waved goodbye to my dad I had a strange feeling. On one hand I knew that there was no turning back now. I had my ticket, my bags were on the plane and in a matter of hours I would be in Morocco. At the same time, the idea of spending six weeks in North Africa really hit me. It is funny to look back on it now because the beginning of a voyage seems so oblivious to the thousands of new experiences you have in those first few days. In a lot of ways, I feel like a different person then the guy that walked that boarded those
Arrival at Amideast
This was the breakfast spread that Amideast (our school) had provided. I had just woken up from the middle of a REM cylce on the bus and was pretty out of it. planes because I have seen a new part of the world that I doubt I'll forget anytime soon.
Anyway, Royal Air Maroc took off no problem. I sat next to a fascinating man from Mali who teaches elementary school French in Louisiana. I feel asleep almost immediately after the plane took off and the next 20 minutes were my only shut-eye during the flight. For the rest of the flight, I read a magazine, ate dinner, and watched the movie (Frost/ Nixon, not bad). The food on Royal Air Maroc was pretty good (lasagna, salad, bread, tomatoes and mozzarella) and all the announcements were in Arabic, French, and English. After the movie, I watched a few minutes of sunrise of the Atlantic. Through that small window on the plane you really get a sense of the vastness of the globe with a spectrum of color just starting to creep of the curve of the horizon. When we landed in Rabat, it was something like 7 am local time and 2 am for my body's clock. Those late nights finally payed off because I maid it until the bus ride before passing out. The ride from Casablanca (where we flew
Where is my fish?
Some child's project from English class. I only feel titled to post this because my French was probably worse when I arrived into) to Rabat was through rural, underdeveloped country that I found interesting for about 15 minutes before exhaustion hit. When we arrived in Rabat we had orientation and food. The room we were in had some amusing english exercises from the local kids.
After orientation, we were assigned families. I was paired with Roger Connaroe and we were the first to get picked up. Our host, Amine, is the man. He speaks English very well and while he practices English, Roger and I practice French. Amine is a newly-wed and his wife, Fatima Ezzarah, is great too. Fatima's sister, Imane also lives with us. On Sunday they took us to the beach for a walk around this old fortress (L'Oudaya) that has a great view of the ocean. It was fun to immediately get out and see Rabat and we returned to have dinner around 9:30 and then pass out a few minutes after. As the pictures show, the first day was really busy, but it only got better from there.
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