Belated Updates

Okay! Lets try this again. Sorry we've all been so bad at updating this over the past few weeks! Various things found ways to continually keep us all busy : )

So since our wonderful weekend in Chefchaouen we've been back in Fes in the apartment and learning massive amounts of Arabic! We just had a test last week, on which one of the questions asked us to write a paragraph in Arabic describing our lives and our families... which intimidated all of us, but was also a nice indicator that something has been sticking over these past 4 weeks of class. We've had a few more afternoons wandering around the medina, and spent quite a bit of time on two occasions in different Berber pharmacies, which are full of herbs and spices and soaps and perfumes and oils, all for traditional medicinal purposes. It was a lot of fun hearing about all the uses for things, and what the various remedies were for things like a runny nose or cough. Also in the medina is a restaurant called Cafe Clocke, which has a beautiful rooftop terrace to eat on, and a camel burger on the menu! obviously we tried it - delicious!
Our weekends have been full of various excursions, one weekend there was a house warming party on Friday night and a Birthday party on Saturday night for other students from the ALIF school who life in GORGEOUS riads in the medina, so both of those nights were a lot of fun and socializing outside of our class of 5 was exciting and nice. The following weekend we hoped on a train north west up the coast to a town called Asilah, which was really really beautiful, and which Darwyn will write a longer post about soon!
This past week we celebrated Darwyn's 25th birthday, and had cake and a nice dinner and, unfortunately, a test in class. Then the next day (Friday) we got on a 13 hour bus headed south west to a city on the coast called Agadir, where we grabbed a taxi and headed to a smaller little beach town called Taghazout that was full of tourist surfers but a really adorable and wonderful little town right on the ocean. We had a long weekend for the Prophet's Birthday, so spent Saturday through Tuesday there before catching another overnight 13hr bus ride back to Fes just in time to run to class!

More updates soon on the two weekend adventures, and again, sorry for such sporadic updates... Thanks for reading!

Best,
Veronica