Hey guys, it's been awhile. I've been busy running all over the country, celebrating holidays, and other valid excuses for not writing. But alas, here's a long one:

So one of the more frustrating parts of transactions here involves a little non-existant coin called the Rial. I don't know where it came from, when it stopped being used, or why on earth people still think in terms of a currency that doesn't exist, but alas, the Rial haunts me. The Rial is equivalent to 1/20th of a dirham, the basic unit here. It's approximately half a cent. Nothing costs "a Rial" in fact most things cost hundreds or thousands of Rials… yet people still tell me prices in Rials. So basically the onus is on me to quickly divide whatever price they give me by 20 to figure out how many Dirhams I owe them… this is particularly fun when the price isn't evenly divisible by 20. Just one more thing to slow down everything about life here- on the spot Rial conversions.

I live at 13 Mouwahidine Street. So do about 1500 other people. Nope, my apartment building only contains about 500 peeps, the other thousand are divided between the OTHER TWO 13 MOUWAHIDINE'S! Yup, almost every building on my street is numbered 13 sort of depleting the entire purpose of numbering buildings. When I tell someone how to get to my apt I literally say "it's the third #13 on Rue Mouwahidine". My friend lives at 37 rue Azegza which is surrounded on each side by buildings numbered 64 and 3. It makes me feel like I'm taking crazypills.

Best Moroccan proverb ever "The poop finds his sister in the ocean". There are regional variations on this one which include "the poop searches for his sister for 100 years". Apparently it is analogous to"The apple doesn't fall far from the tree".

So Noah is now in Morocco with me so that means I am living with two Veggies. His 'trying to be a vegan in Morocco' adventures have been going pretty well so far. The communal eating style allows him to shove the meat over to my part of the dish so I can discreetly chow on it while no one is looking. He's also getting really good at eating just the potatoes out of meat tajines. My roommate Alex is also a veggie and her luck has not been so great. Not only does asking "does this have meat in it" never work because everyone works with a different definition of meat but also most don't consider "small bits of meat" actual meat. Worst was that for her birthday one of our Moroccan friends had his mom make a huge pastilla (read: delicious meatful concoction that takes FOREVER to prepare) as a gift to her, unaware of her vegginess. It was one of those situations where there is no way around it, it would be incredibly offensive if she didn't eat it, so being the little trooper she was took a big bite and had her first meat in 5 years… and indigestion to follow.

We did a little Moroccan Christmas here which included lots of substitutions for actual traditions but the net effect was pretty jolly. I used hammam gloves (exfoliater mits) as Xmas stockings and made a 'fireplace' to hang them on out of three candles. No firetroubles to boot. I hung mint sprigs from the doorway instead of mistletoe and there was an attempt at virgin eggnog but it sorta turned out like an omelet and had to be quickly escorted to the garbage chute.

Then came Eid Kabir, that holiday when for the week proceeding everything smells like sheep. What's worse, it rained a lot so everything smelled like wet sheep. I think several of my neighbors kept their sheep inside their apartments (b/c apparently sheep theft is a big problem). These aren't your little county fair cute sheep. They are large, dirty, smelly, and nast. They even have really long tails which I'd never seen before but honestly don't spend that much time near sheep ass in order to be confident that it's an abnormality. The details are in the previous entry but I must mention a little phenomenon called a sheep balloon and tell you that we named my friends' sheep Fido b/c when it was skinned and drying in the corner of the house it looked like a sleeping pitbull (with no head).