What’s up yall. It’s been a minute, and for that I apologize. Things were crazy, so I took a break for a couple of days, but the more days I took a break, the more stuff I had to write about, which meant more time that I didn’t have, and so on and so forth. I had feared this would happen eventually, and I fulfilled my own prophecy. I’m pretty much Harry Potter.

Last Friday, after class, we all loaded onto some buses and took the 8-hour drive to Merzouga, a small town on the edge of the Sahara Desert. We spent the night at a fancy hotel and in the morning drove another hour to a different hotel, where we left everything non-essential, and then hopped on some camels and rode off into the dessert. Though it was very hot, and the sand filled winds stung a little, the beauty of the Sahara was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. We watched the sunset on camelback, before arriving at a Berber camp where we were served food. After dinner, we listened to some traditional drum music, after which most people went to sleep, but some friends and I, along with a guide we had befriended, took an hour-long hike to the top of the highest dune in the area, lit only by the full moon. From the top you could see miles of dunes, like waves frozen in time. It was the highlight of my time in Morocco so far. When it was time to head down, we ran down the slope of the dune, undoing an hour’s worth of hiking in about 45 seconds. It felt like flying. Also, my friend Aliya tripped and ate shit, so that was funny. We got to bed late and woke up early, and spent the next day sleeping through the eight-hour bus ride back.

The following week has been hellish to say the least. Monday and Tuesday had presentations, Wednesday had a quiz and a speaking test, and tomorrow is the final (I’m here for nine weeks, but it’s really a 6-week program with an additional 3 weeks tacked on at the end). However, after tomorrow, I should be done with tests for a couple of weeks, so to celebrate, I’m heading to Chefchauen, the blue city. My two nights in the hotel will cost $24. Morocco is great.

Finally, today we ate turkey for lunch, the Arabic word for which is pronounced “Dick”, and my host mom didn’t know the English word, so she tried to explain it using a combination of English and French (it is big, black chicken…) which ultimately resulted in a devout Muslim grandmother uttering the phrase “Dick, it is like cock”, with all possible innocence, while I nodded politely and died in the inside.

We have a 5-10-minute presentation in Arabic due on Friday, and a 10-15-minute presentation in English due Tuesday, plus a quiz this Friday and a cumulative test next Friday, so it’s been a busy day. My Arabic presentation could be on any topic I wanted, so I’m giving a presentation on Milwaukee, because choosing a topic I would need to research, given everything else going on right now, would be a bad idea. The English presentation is on the post-independence struggle to create the Moroccan government, which sounded interesting when I picked the topic weeks ago, but isn’t quite as cool when the teacher sends you a 280-page book as a “starting point” a week before the presentation is due. To make matters worse, all the students in the Minnesota program are travelling to the Sahara for three days/two nights this weekend, which I’ve been looking forward to for weeks, but which will significantly cut into my prep time. I finished the Milwaukee presentation today (read: I copy/pasted some beer logos into a powerpoint) and I will hopefully finish the “starting point” book tomorrow. It will be a long week-and-a-half.

I bought nuts from the same corner store for the second day in a row. I now officially have a nut dealer.

I also figured out that tea is served around eight pm, but only if you’re awake. Now I know how to get to ten pm dinner without starving.

My parents arrived in Morocco last Friday, and things have been moving pretty much non-stop since then, so this is going to be one long reflection instead of a daily thing.

Friday after class, I did my best to rush back to the hotel where my parents are staying, because wandering around Fes without a guide will get you lost in about a minute, so they had spent the whole morning cooped up in the hotel. We took a taxi to what I thought was the nearest ATM to get them some Dirham, and then got to the old city and found out there are ATM’s everywhere. I did my best to show them around the old city while still managing to miss most of the places I was trying to show them, and afterwards we had tea with my host family, which was wonderful, but if we’re being honest, it was also a little weird to have my host parents and my real parents in the same room, talking to each other. After tea, we went out for a dinner that no one was really hungry for, but that we felt like we had to eat, because that’s what you do when you visit a foreign county.

The next day (Saturday for those of you who are keeping track), my host parents gave us a real tour of the old city and showed my real parents all the things I had meant to show them, but couldn’t find. We also visited my host-dad’s carpet-dealer-friend, who tried his damnedest to sell us a carpet. His employees must have rolled out thirty of them for us. We were there long enough that we got tea. Afterwards we ate lunch and napped, and then my mom threw up everywhere.

Sunday morning everyone was feeling better, which was good, because we had booked a taxi to Ifrane, the National Park/monkey refuge that I had been trying to get to for weeks. It turns out, the park was way cooler than even I had anticipated. The monkeys were so tame that they would hold your hand and eat out of it. They would even pick through my trail mix and just eat the green seed things. It was the wildest thing I’ve done in a long time.

Monday, I had class as usual, and afterwards rushed back to get my parents money, because they didn’t have the cash to pay their taxi driver to get them to the airport. Now they owe me. The tables have turned in this relationship. Nonetheless, it was sad to see them go.

Also, my toothbrush developed the same neon pink stains that I noticed on my white towel a month ago so I had to buy a new one. The plot thickens.

Nothing really happened today, but my parents arrive at the Fes airport at 11:30 tonight, and I’ll see them tomorrow. Misadventure awaits.

Class today included both a test and presentations, so it was a pretty high stakes morning. After class, we all rushed over to the nearest café to watch the Morocco-Portugal match. Normally, I hate watching sports on tv, but this was fun. I think that’s in part because professional soccer has no commercials and doesn’t stop the clock, so a 90-minute game is 90 minutes, not three hours; and in part because the level off pure hatred for Christiano Ronaldo was all but tangible. That said, Morocco’s team is pretty bad, and they lost 1-0. They will play Spain later this week, but they won’t be moving past the initial round.

My parents are arriving in Fes tomorrow night (they’ve been in Italy for the past week), so I had to go over to their hotel and arrange for a taxi to pick them up at the airport. However, when I arrived, I discovered that the manager only spoke French and my host dad who was with me only speaks Arabic, so we had to find a housekeeper who spoke Arabic and French to translate between us. I feel confident that a taxi will pick them up at the airport, but I have absolutely no idea why the housekeeper gave me a complete tour of the hotel, or why it took an hour to arrange a taxi.

After the match, we tried to go to the taco place, but it’s under construction right now, so we got some street shawarma instead. No complaints there.

After dinner, my host mom and I talked for about an hour on the boycotts and strikes that have been going on in Morocco for the past month. Moroccans are rightly concerned about the closeness of the government to many businesses inside and outside of the country and have responded with boycotts on certain brands of milk, fish, bottled water, and gasoline. Additionally, there is a boycott of the government-sponsored music festival that is going on right now, and the videos from it are crazy. Moroccans are upset that their government can pay foreign musicians millions of dollars to come and play a 2-hour set but can’t find money for education or health. As a result, they’ve decided not to go, and footage shows huge festival stages with big name artists (Bruno Mars and Wiz Khalifa both come later this week) and crowds of maybe 15 people. The king is expected to speak out soon and hopes seem high for positive change (contrary to what I expected, the king is actually seen as more of a champion of the people than the parliament is here, because the king doesn’t have to worry about money for elections so he can’t be bought off as easily). We will see where things go from here.

So it was late last night and I decided I could just write about my day when I woke up, but I didn’t want to get up any earlier, and after class we had to watch the Morocco – Portugal match, and now by the time I’m back I’ve forgotten most of what I did yesterday, which probably means it wasn’t all that spectacular anyway. What I do remember is that:

-a couple weeks ago all the street cats were pregnant and now there’s kittens everywhere

-the new Nas album was disappointing

-we were promised that there would be an opportunity to debate/argue during Morocco-in-Context class and there was not

Today was a learning day; it was our first day at the homestay since Ramadan ended, which means there is an entirely new schedule of events every day. It turns out that Moroccans are my people. With the new schedule, we get up at 7 for class, work from 8-12, do homework and relax for a bit, eat lunch at 3, nap for a but, and then eat dinner at 10:30ish. These aren’t all too different from the hours I kept while living on my own at college, so it works pretty well for me.

Lunch is the big meal of the day here, and today’s lunch was accompanied by a reddish-purple drink, which I had hoped was strawberry-based, but which was in fact beets blended into water. It was kind of gross, but my host mom really likes it, so I guess I’ll have to get used to it.

The World Cup has been all-engrossing, and it reveals a lot about people. For example, my host mom is very angry that Saudi Arabia voted for the US to host the 2026 cup instead of Morocco. Also, the top-trending video on Moroccan Youtube is a cat the predicts the outcome of the Morocco-Iran game. It’s four-and-a-half minutes of the cat not doing what it’s supposed to, and finally in the it picks the food dish with the Iranian flag, which would seem like a fluke, but Iran won in overtime, so maybe this cat’s onto something.

The weather shot up 20 degrees the day after fasting stopped. My host mom thinks it is a sign that God was watching out for them during Ramadan. I can’t speak on that, but I can tell you that it’s hot as hell here and everything feels sticky and our apartment has no air conditioning.

We had another 8-hour train ride home today, so there isn’t a whole lot to write about. When we got back, we had a nice dinner, and afterwards a conversation reminiscent of “Who’s on First” in which I tried to explain to my host mom that we had an afternoon class on “Tuesday”, while she tried to figure out which “two days” I had afternoon class. Several minutes later, she told me a story in which she confused donkeys and monkeys to similar effect. It was a fun time.

Today Fan and I went on the tour I booked yesterday; I was a little skeptical about hiring a stranger to show us around, but it ended up being really fun. We started off at a home when some women were making argon oil by hand, and they showed us the process the product went through. After that, we got to ride some camels, which is kind of like riding a horse, except it bucks up and down more. After the camels, we ate lunch in an Amazigh village, and after that we went on a two-hour hike through the Atlas Mountains. Fan wasn’t a huge fan (sorry) of the hike (in fairness, it was pretty intense), but I thought the view was beautiful, and the hike was the best exercise I’ve gotten since arriving here. When we got back, we went to a surprisingly good Italian restaurant, and then came back to the hotel to rest. The hike took a lot out of us; Fan fell asleep while we were waiting for our food at the restaurant.