June 18

It's adventure time! We were given a list of three places to go visit in Rabat with no directions as to how to get there. The goal of the exercise was to practice asking for directions in Arabic. The places we needed to visit were the royal palace, the national library, and a store that sold something Moroccan. I must admit, when I first heard what the exercise entailed, I wasn't thrilled. Soon, this proved to be one of the funnest activities.

Ashley, Bess, Michelle and I set off with our not-so-great Arabic and absolutely no sense of direction! After asking a very kind woman to direct us to the royal palace and not understanding the directions, we decided it might be a good idea to take a taxi. There are two types of taxis in Morocco big taxis or taxi kbeer and small taxis or taxi sgheer. The difference is that a taxi kbeer fits up to six people and the sgheer fits only three. Because there was four of us, we needed a taxi kbeer. Patiently, we waited for a taxi kbeer and after 10 minutes we decided to try to walk somewhere else. As we were walking we saw a police car. I asked the policeman if he could give us the phone number of a taxi company (yes, I asked in Arabic!) or if he could tell us where we could find one. The policeman told us to wait there, that he was going to look for one. He got in his car and drove away. Ten minutes later we see a taxi kbeer being escorted by the police car coming towards us and stopping right where we are. The taxi diver gets out of the car and so does the policeman. The policeman says goodbye to us and the driver kindly greets us! We couldn't believe the policeman went out of his way like that to help us out!

We got in the taxi and started talking to the driver, Abdal Latiff, while he was taking us to the royal palace, our first stop. We successfully made it there and bargained our rate with the driver. We thought we had overpaid for the ride, but turns out, we got a pretty good price!

Abdal Latiff dropped us off and we started walking without really knowing how to get to the palace itself so we decided to ask. We found two young ladies walking toward us and Ashley asked for directions to the palace. They kindly walked us there and, in the meantime, talked to us in Arabic. In the picture, you can see our two friends (Asma and Qthia) standing with us in front of the royal palace. After showing us where to go, they were nice enough to give us a brief history lesson on Morocco (in Arabic, of course!). I understood more than I thought I was going to, so it felt great! There were also parts of the explanation I didn't quite understand, but I'm also very good at pretending to understand! :)

By the time they finished the explanation, we asked them for directions to the national library. They told us they were walking to take a bus to go run some errands at their school, and that the same bus could drop us off at a nearby location. So we all walked toward the bus stop and meanwhile stopped to take pics in front of the parliament. We also passed by a newspaper/magazine stand (owned by Asma's cousin) and bought the equivalent of the "National Inquirer" in Arabic. We had, thus, completed two of our tasks: the first, to visit the royal palace, and the second to go to a store that sold something Moroccan! We only had one more place to visit, but we ran out of time, so we had to head back.

We returned to the ryad and had our last meal there: couscous. After lunch, we hopped on a bus that took us to Tangier. Because the American School of Tangier (where we're staying) was not ready for our arrival just yet, we stayed at a hotel for three days until Tuesday. Our hotel, the Tanjah Flandria is very conveniently located, but not that nice of a hotel when compared to the incredible places we've been staying at so far. We got to Tangier around 7pm and had dinner at 8:30pm. I was pretty tired so I went to bed early.

Overall, the trip is going really well, but I just can't wait to finally get to a place where I can unpack!