jolie Paris!

Shifa and I escaped to Paris and visited Claire!


We did all the wonderful touristy, Parisian things...

















Such as... posing on the bank of the Seine,


and photographing the Eiffel Tower several times:







Afternoon,













Evening,













Twilight? *












Dusk?














Dusk-er...

















And night - note the twinkling!









(*does twilight come before dusk, or the other way around?)




At the Louvre:

















Shifa is quite the refined art critic.

















This man seems to have put a dagger into his thigh?


















Islamic art at the Louvre


















Boogie 'til you puke?!


















Peek-a-boo!

















Yee-ouch!






















I am French sculpture.


















Oh, Mona. Why are you so famous?




















At the Musee d'Orsay, which was (disappointingly!) closed



















The Arab World Institute in Paris, not as relevant as we'd hoped...























Claire et moi in front of the Sacre Coeur
















The view of Paris at Montmartre

















Montmartre

















So many steps!


















Shifa LOVES crepes, and really -- who can blame her?


















If you know French, you get it.
If you don't, this is REALLY funny. Trust me.
(Okay, so maybe it's not THAT funny...)


















Why hasn't coffee-capitalism reached Fez yet?























One more bottle of red for the road. I opened this with a pen. Who said I didn't learn anything relevant at UMBC?

















Back to Fez, yikes!



Au revoir, jolie Paris.

Happy Thanksgiving!

So, technically there is no Thanksgiving in Morocco, so I would like to take this moment to remember last year's Thanksgiving. I made pie! Sweet, literally, teehee.

Hey there, how are things?

And it has been an eventful two weeks, indeed -- Spain and France, and lots of changes to my class schedules...

First things first, I would like to include an important update regarding my future plans: I will be finishing my Fulbright at the end of May 2007, so that I can matriculate into the 2007/08 Teach For America Philadelphia corps (PhilAdelPHiA FREEdom!) My assignment is secondary English, and I am really super pumped -- yesss...

Alright -- so I went to SPAIN, Tarifa to be exact -- one of the windsailing capitals of Europe. It was fun, but cold, probably because of the wind? And I might add that the ferry from Tanger to Tarifa is in no way a comfortable means of travelling.

Tarifa is really designed for tourism, but beautiful.



Above: the view up the road from our hostel. Below: the sweet moped parked outside the window of our room.




Above: Spanish church! Below: Inside the Spainish church!




The view from Tarifa across the straits.. if you look closely you can see a big gray mound, otherwise known as Africa.



There is a lot of graffiti in Tarifa (darn hippie kids!) but at least it's interesting and not merely gang tags...

I'm not sure what is going on in the above image...

Some more...

Power to the people/anarchy in the U.K./storm the Bastille!/keep it real, for sure.



Keep close, pictures of Paris to come! I promise they will be more exicting than my pictures of Tarifa.

Morocco has the best doors...

This is in the medina in Volubilis



















And in Fes...
































































Irish pride!?

Censor! Delete!

Morocco doesn't observe daylight saving's time -- making me 5-6 hours ahead of those that I love instead of a mere 4-5. I am sure it is only pyschological, but I think that I feel further away. Grr-oss.

It was a pretty good week/weekend, I've managed to acquire plane tickets for Paris next month: Awesome. A trip to Spain is also in the works -- life is great, really and truely. I also acquired some pretty fancy Moroccan jewelry. Nancy and I went to the medina and ended up running into a shopowner that Shifa and I had previously befriended. He has the cutest shop, complete with the cutest kitten in the world. The kitten jumped in my purse, I reallyrealllly wanted to run away with it...

We also bought kohl, which is super-difficult to apply with a wooden stick (most things are?) but Nancy and I somehow managed despite our somewhat less-girly personalities. Pictures below! You've been forewarned...







Me + my shopowner buddy Abdelaziz. He helps me with my Arabic. Sometimes he helps me with my English...












Nancy and I in Abdelaziz's superexciting shop of all things awesome.















Wearing new jewelry and attempting kohl... cute.

The blog from Casa

The hardest thing about starting to write a blog is figuring out what to name it... Luckily I've got the Moroccan populace to assist me with such complicated tasks.

Classes restart tomorrow, which is sort of a drag, though entirely necessary. I've run out of things to read which interest me and my sleep schedule is ruined -- almost like I'm still in undergrad, amazing.

The break gave Shifa and I an excellent chance to roam about and to visit Casa -- it's what fancy Moroccans call Casablanca, oh la la (Shifa, for those who don't know, is my most excellent roommate whose company I enjoy immensely). We had a lot of fun photographing the beach, eating in abandoned restaurants after ftor (yess, even the famous Rick's Cafe), befriending confused taxi drivers, and fleeing warzones in crowded cars. Seriously though, Casablanca is a really fabulous and beautiful city.




The beach... so beautiful!




Shifa waiting for the train to El-Jedida, an old port town.
We fled El-Jedida. See below.






A prime photo of Shifa surveying some meat at the market in Casa.




A cute park in the center of the city -- with a cute Moroccan child. Moroccan children are the cutest I have ever seen.





Me at the only cafe in Casa that is open for breakfast during Ramadan. Lots of French men and cigarettes.



The streets of charming Casablanca, I'm not sure this guy was too keen on me taking the picture.




Some beautiful beach shots...






The main stretch across from the central market.




One for the parents, me in Rick's Cafe!




M'a s'salaama!