Adjustments

I will consider myself officially adjusted the day I pick up my arabic text book and open it the right way. I literally open this book at least four times a day and each time I have to flip it over and around and remind myself that the pages go from "back to front" since the script writes from right to left. It's really absurd that there doesn't seem to be any learning curve here… everything in this country with words on it opens the same way, yet I can't seem to anticipate that when I reach for my books every day. I guess 22 years of conditioning is hard to shake off.

So I think it's really funny that the word for 'beef' in Moroccan Arabic is 'ham'… it's even funnier b/c ham doesn't exist here because everyone is Muslim.

In other news my host brother is a tool. He desperately needed me to tell him yesterday which of his two identical pairs of glasses was cooler. He also is obsessed with tongue twisters and comes into my room about every 30 minutes to tell me how many pickled peppers Peter Piper has picked. The other day when we were all doing homework together he erased something, then formed the eraser bits into a line and pretended to snort them... Silly Ayoub.

We've been meeting a lot of former Fulbrighters… because they are all married to Moroccan men and living in Morocco now! Not kidding- have already met five girls who met their husbands during their grant periods. We already have a bet about which of the girls is going to be the next victim in our group and I'm pretty sure I will be making money on this deal b/c the girl I bet on is already pining for cute Moroccan babies. I thought only Supna suffered from ovary pain atthis sight of cute kids…

I'm slowly learning how Instant Messenger works in Morocco… there is an intensive code. I hung out with my friend Neda who was talking online with her friends and I think there needs to be a separate class at my school to understand this stuff. First, it's Arabic written in latin letters so they use numbers to represent sounds that don't exist in Latin (3=swallowed A, 7=phlegmy H, 5=exhale H…). Then there is the weird French hybrid too. So for example," kwoi 2 9" is followed by m3rftch. It hurts my brain to decode it. I'm scared to download MSN messenger and enter this world.

And some practical knowledge before I go: If you plug two transformers into each other, the one closest to the wall blows up.