Class starts an hour early on Fridays, and that wasn’t fun. On a brighter note, the quiz wasn’t bad. After class I got lunch and headed down to the French Walmart and finally replaced my shower rag. Now I have a full size, crimson towel. I also bought some green apple Mentos, because that was the closest thing to a sour candy I could find. Some foods here have different flavors to match the middle eastern palette, and it’s kind of weird. For example, when you look at potato chips, the best flavor, barbecue, cannot be found here, but in its place, Lays makes a kebab flavor and Pringles has paprika flavor. I bring this up because today I saw a pack of Mentos with a tree on it, and the label was in French/Arabic with words I didn’t recognize. My friends and I bought a pack to see what tree-flavored Mentos would taste like and it turns out it was black licorice, but to be honest, tree-flavor would have been better.
Fan and a couple other students headed to Casablanca this weekend, so Iftar was a little quieter. There were more French fries today, as well as some sort of fried beef or lamb. On one of the hidden camera shows that plays during Iftar, they pranked a man by pretending to have him get kidnaped and interrogated by gangsters. Two nights ago, they pranked a different man by having him jump out of a plane, and having the skydiving instructor pretend the parachute wasn’t working. America really needs to step up its prank show game.
After Iftar, I met up with some of the graduate students/candidates studying at ALIF at a nearby café. One of them (Liz) is a Doctoral candidate at Madison in the Spanish department and is in my current Arabic class, but the rest I had never met before. Also there was Murad (not sure how he spells it), a Moroccan Masters student who I keep running into at the Riad. Sitting and talking with all of them about their various studies and projects was fascinating.
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