I was particularly proud of today’s title, although it has nothing to do with the first two paragraphs.
On Sunday, Imad invited me to go to the beach with him and his ex-lifeguard friend. So we hop on a bus, walk a quarter mile and arrive at the most pristinely blue water I have seen. It was a small public beach, away from the city. One of those places only locals know about, but that’s not to say it wasn’t croweded. It only took us 10 minutes to walk the entire length of the beach, we then found a spot for our towels, and went for a swim.
When we were half way to the rock we were swimming towards, I realized why Imad and his friend had repeatedly asked if I knew how to swim on the way over: while I am no Michael Phelps, I can pull off a pretty convincing forward crawl Imad cannot. A combination of doggie-paddle and drowning, it’s apparent that not all Moroccans, despite going to the beach every weekend, know how to swim. After our 20 minute swim, we get back on land, Imad et al. go off to smoke somewhere which gives me some time for a light nap and some heavy people watching. I see the sharp contrast in my foreign beach experiences; in France, we were the overly clad Americans, with women rarely wearing tops, and both sexes not wearing anything a moderate amount of the time. Here, the common male swimsuit is the synthetic male-capris that everyone wears so often and girls (although the beach population is only 10% female) are clad in long-sleeves, long pants, and a shawl. This would be very modest attire in Athens during Christmas mass, much less a 100° day at the beach. Nonetheless everyone seemed to be having fun playing (very competitive) pick-up beach soccer, thrashing in the water, and soaking up the sun. I started to feel the burn coming so I found Imad and headed home just in time for dinner.
Monday, I came home from work to find Vincent (the Dutch volunteer who is staying in the other rented room) back from his 2 week trip home and met his little brother Sebastian. I offered to use my Meknes culinary skill and tried to recreate Zaalouk, a tomato eggplant paste spread over bread. While it was edible I think I put in to much tomato paste. Ill get it right before my food network pilot premiere. After dinner, we went out for a drink, and I marveled at their English level. While they both went to bi-lingual schools, and assured me not every Dutch person speaks as well as they do, I felt a little ashamed of our foreign language education system. While my French is first-rate as far as non-native languages go back in the states, their English blows my French out of the water. I guess I’ll just have to go for quantity and learn Darija.
Monday I started my formal Darija classes. While it is 2 weeks later than I requested (thanks Fenna), I’m still excited to pick up a new skill. I figure I’m pretty good with words, accents, and languages (heck I’m doing phonological research!), how hard could picking up the basics be? Very hard, actually. We started with the alphabet, and by the fourth letter, the scene was something out of a SNL sketch:
“Raba-ah”
“Raba-ah”
“Non non, ecoute: Raba-ah”
“Raba-ah”
“Non repete: Ra”
“Ra”
“Ba”
“Ba”
“ah”
“ah”
“Raba-ah”
“Raba-ah”
“Non! Pas Raba-ah, Raba-ah”
“THATS WHAT I’M SAYING”
Although it is frustrating at time (I find her constant usage of the phrase “well of course” particularly innerving:
“so there are gender specific pronouns in the singular but not the plural”
“But of course”
[to myself] “that’s not that obvious”)
I think the courses are going pretty well.
I’ve graduated from the patented Passarello point-and-grunt (or maybe it’s a copyright, Nick can I get the legal interpretation?), and after two two-hour classes, I can go through salutations like nobody’s business, count to 100, ask simple questions (how much, where, when, why, who, how), and express needs and desires. Maybe at then end of my lessons (five two-hour sessions) I will be past the single-word utterance phase (which linguistically would put me at the intellectual equivalent of a 2-year-old).
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