Hello Everyone! I hope you all missed me. I have officially started the fall semester after spending a very relaxing week on the North Moroccan coast in a beach town called Asilah. My loyal followers may recognize the name of the town from my travels in Morocco two summers ago. I even stayed in the same Hostel. In addition to spending 4 blissful days on the beach (and finishing two books), my classmates and I went clubbing in Tangier and spent a couple days exploring the old medina in Asilah as well as the secondhand clothing markets. We arrived in Tangier around 11:30pm thinking the clubs started getting busy around midnight but little did we know that peak club time in Tangier is between 1:30am and 2:30am, which normally is waaaay past my bedtime. Nonetheless, it was one of the most enjoyable nights (or mornings I guess I could say since we didn't get back to our hostel in Asilah until about 4:45am) of my trip thus far. I have an abbreviated week due to Eid al-Adha (al-Kibiir) with roughly translates to Day of Sacrifice, where my host family will be slaughtering a goat. I have never experienced this holiday in an Arab country before so I will be sure to give a detailed description in my next post to give you all a more holistic picture of its traditions and what not. Since many families eat all the of goat and obviously do not want to waste anything I have heard descriptions of many different interesting meat dishes that I will be sure to share with you all next week! Thanks for reading and keep the questions coming!
All for now,
Johnny M.
Monday, August 28, 2017
Monday, August 14, 2017
Week 8: Last week of classes for the summer!
Hello Everyone! I can't believe I'm saying this but I have finished my summer classes and in two weeks will be moving onto Fall classes. I believe I went into some detail about what the fall will entail course-wise so I won't elaborate on that. It's been an incredibly beneficial summer in which my Arabic has improved a lot in a very short period of time so I am very excited to see what will happen in the fall and spring. I noticed two questions in the comments of my last blog post.
1 - What classes are there at the Community center?
2 - What classes are offered at the gym?
In regards to the first questions I do not know for sure but the director definitely talked about there being Writing and Reading and Computer Literacy classes but he also added that if we would like to lead special seminars on topics of interest with the older kids and adults then we are more than welcome. He was also creating spaces for art and dance and music classes to eventually make their way into the center. In terms of what I would do if I had to teach it would really depend on what the kids want. I'm simply at the center to interact with the community and use Arabic rather than to teach the children topics I personally consider important or interesting. I don't consider it appropriate for me to enter their space and say here's what you need to know. If they want to learn a little more about a topic I have some background in that's a difference story. I also am not super interested in teaching a class by myself but who knows? That may change.
My gym, judging by the music that always seems to be blasting whenever I go, has a lot of dance classes. There is also a pool (which I do not have access to, costs extra, I'm cheap) and I believe they have swimming classes and water aerobics and the like as I see many fairly large groups of people coming and going. Other gyms in the city have similar classes and even some martial arts. A good friend goes to a kickboxing class at her gym a couple times a week and they've already gotten into sparring. So there seems to be a good bit of variety in what classes gyms in Meknes offer but the offerings also vary by gender and many gyms have separate (at times less convenient) hours for women.
As always, thanks for reading and keep the questions coming (feel free to ask about anything). Next week I will probably discuss my upcoming beach trip and plans for the break.
All for now,
Johnny M.
1 - What classes are there at the Community center?
2 - What classes are offered at the gym?
In regards to the first questions I do not know for sure but the director definitely talked about there being Writing and Reading and Computer Literacy classes but he also added that if we would like to lead special seminars on topics of interest with the older kids and adults then we are more than welcome. He was also creating spaces for art and dance and music classes to eventually make their way into the center. In terms of what I would do if I had to teach it would really depend on what the kids want. I'm simply at the center to interact with the community and use Arabic rather than to teach the children topics I personally consider important or interesting. I don't consider it appropriate for me to enter their space and say here's what you need to know. If they want to learn a little more about a topic I have some background in that's a difference story. I also am not super interested in teaching a class by myself but who knows? That may change.
My gym, judging by the music that always seems to be blasting whenever I go, has a lot of dance classes. There is also a pool (which I do not have access to, costs extra, I'm cheap) and I believe they have swimming classes and water aerobics and the like as I see many fairly large groups of people coming and going. Other gyms in the city have similar classes and even some martial arts. A good friend goes to a kickboxing class at her gym a couple times a week and they've already gotten into sparring. So there seems to be a good bit of variety in what classes gyms in Meknes offer but the offerings also vary by gender and many gyms have separate (at times less convenient) hours for women.
As always, thanks for reading and keep the questions coming (feel free to ask about anything). Next week I will probably discuss my upcoming beach trip and plans for the break.
All for now,
Johnny M.
Sunday, August 6, 2017
Week 7: Winding down to the End of the summer program
Hello everyone! Well I can't believe I'm saying this but I'm already almost done with the summer! This upcoming week is our last week of classes complete with a final recording for our Moroccan Arabic class (~10 minutes covering 5 different cultural topics like souqs, clothing, music, etc.) and a final paper for Modern Standard Arabic (800-1000 words). The last week of the summer program involves final interviews, signing up for fall content courses and direct enrollment classes, and finalizing community service placements. I will most likely be volunteering at a local community center potentially teaching (hopefully not, I don't particularly want to work with kids but I'm always flexible). The director of the center knows some doctoral students in Linguistics who may want to do some sort of project with me so more details on that will follow as I get them.
This past week I finally joined a gym and its really invigorated my daily routine. The gym's not the fanciest in the world but it gets the job done. My main issue is the club also has group classes which would be fine but they blast odd remixes of Western techno and 80s music so regardless of what's in my headphones I get to listen to odd remixes of Western techno and 80s music. Additionally, there are no clips for the barbells to hold the weights but I haven't had any problems as of yet. At first the fact that everything was in kilograms threw me off but I got used to that fairly quickly. The last major issue is there are about 3 or 4 different styles of dumbbells and some styles have complete pairs and some don't so you have to mix and match but the more difficult part is you have to guess the weight cause only 1 or 2 of the styles are labelled. As much as I seem to be complaining about this place, its maybe a minute from my host family's place and its like 16 bucks a month. There are cheaper places but I'm paying for the convenience of a close place so I can't talk myself out of going (I went 4 days last week so I think it's working!).
That's all for now. As always questions, comments, and concerns are always welcome!
Johnny M.
This past week I finally joined a gym and its really invigorated my daily routine. The gym's not the fanciest in the world but it gets the job done. My main issue is the club also has group classes which would be fine but they blast odd remixes of Western techno and 80s music so regardless of what's in my headphones I get to listen to odd remixes of Western techno and 80s music. Additionally, there are no clips for the barbells to hold the weights but I haven't had any problems as of yet. At first the fact that everything was in kilograms threw me off but I got used to that fairly quickly. The last major issue is there are about 3 or 4 different styles of dumbbells and some styles have complete pairs and some don't so you have to mix and match but the more difficult part is you have to guess the weight cause only 1 or 2 of the styles are labelled. As much as I seem to be complaining about this place, its maybe a minute from my host family's place and its like 16 bucks a month. There are cheaper places but I'm paying for the convenience of a close place so I can't talk myself out of going (I went 4 days last week so I think it's working!).
That's all for now. As always questions, comments, and concerns are always welcome!
Johnny M.
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