Well, we're here!

This has been an incredibly long and exhausting day, but I've seen so much!

It started with me waking up in Indianapolis, IN after celebrating the men's team's victory over Illinois (despite that game being in Happy Valley and me actually being present for the women's team's loss to Illinois in Indianapolis). I then saw off the bus taking the rest of the band back home and I took a cab to the Indianapolis airport where I caught my flight to JFK. At JFK, I met the rest of the class and then caught the flight to Casablanca. 

When I saw the rest of the class, I immediately started to get excited about the travel! Our TA Dave Vargas had created a little book for us that also includes plenty of helpful information. While we've been studying some of the basics of the language for the past few weeks, the booklet includes even more and should serve as a big help. It's been a help already!

Upon our arrival in Casablanca, the first thing I started to notice was the Arabic language written all over everything - doesn't seem like it would be that big of a difference until you are actually here and you see it. The language is quite beautiful when all spelled out, and reminded me of my experiences in India seeing the Hindi language everywhere.

We left the airport to go to a train station and then took a train into Rabat. The ride wasn't terribly long, but it was long enough that we could relax a little bit and just look out the window at everything surrounding us. It was striking how much a lot of the towns we passed reminded me of the rural places in India that I've seen. The homes are not very big, but are made out of whatever materials are indigenous to the area, and whatever they have will suffice. The biggest difference was the beautiful green of the grass and pastures that we could see. I found this to be surprising, but have learned that this is indeed a rare occurrence and is only due to an unseasonably high amount of rain.

The train took us to Rabat where we then went to AMIDEAST for some additional cultural awareness training before we would split up and meet our host families for the day. The people at AMIDEAST were very helpful in answering our questions and helping us get ready for the long week ahead. We were all exhausted already and technically it was only late morning at that point in Morocco (we lost our night because of the flight!).

Once we left AMIDEAST, we met our host families. This was one of the most wonderful aspects of the whole trip. I was staying with Gopal and Jon, and our family was amazing. We really did hit it off and feel like a family right away. The mother and father helped us to learn some words in Darija, while the little brother took us around the city. We had an absolutely delicious lunch and dinner before our long-awaited sleep!