Tangier.

Sorry I haven’t written in a while. It’s just that … well, it’s summer school. And also, this page hasn't been loading for the past few days. So I've been trying, really!

But anyway, we’re in Tangier now, at the American school, have been for over two weeks. The campus consists of a building of classrooms, two dorms (separate for guys and girls, but each with a common room that people of either gender may enter), a cafeteria in the guys’ dorm where they provide us with breakfast and lunch every day, and a playground, because this is after all a school and not a university. There’s flowers, palm trees, and among the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen. It’s actually really nice. And the girls’ dorm is air conditioned, so that’s a plus, although really the weather here is pretty temperate. Better than Indiana definitely.

The downfall? We’re stuck in a walled compound with four hours of class and about that much homework or more every day, plus other optional classes if you want (I don’t, usually) and required speaking partners for an hour a week and occasional lectures/trips that are kind of a waste of time – spending over two hours at a museum of old stone tools, really? Add a 10:30 curfew on weekdays (midnight on weekends) and “fun” isn’t really a huge option, although we do get glimpses of it. And I mean, getting delicious mint tea between classes always makes one feel better.

Despite my griping, there has been the occasional day when I didn’t have an insurmountable amount of homework. I spent one of these walking along the esplanade for a couple of hours, which was beautiful, although I didn't really take any pictures. However, I do have some snapshots of the sea, taken from the American Legation Museum and the Kasbah respectively:

So that's nice. The land in the first picture is part of Morocco, but if you stand in the same spot and turn left, you can see Spain in the distance.

On an unrelated note, interacting with people is not something that happens much, especially since most of them speak French first, Moroccan dialect second, and Modern Standard Arabic never. I have had a pretty successful conversation with a cab driver on the way to Marjane (the Moroccan Wal*Mart, basically) in Arabic, so that was cool, but also a rarity. Then again, so is getting out of the compound for any extended amount of time. Ho-hum school.