#learningshit

(via The poet of Baalbek translated from the Arabic story of Khalil Gibran)

Or as I like to call it, a day of eating. Or rather, 2 or 3 or 115 days of eating. I'm going to need to buy a second seat on the airplane home.

We arrived in Fes in the evening yesterday and stayed the night at the most beautiful maison d'hôte - a former private home that has been converted to a hotel, as my home-stay father told me tonight. The walls, the windows, the mosaic on the ground, everything was just so beautiful and detailed. Hand-carved too, probably, which I can imagine was no easy feat.

So, dinner last night started with an array of delicious tapas - caramelized onions with golden raisins, wonderfully spiced carrots, lentils, olives, other unidentifiable but scrumptious things. I overloaded my plate with tapas and wondered how I was ever possibly going to eat the next course of chicken with prunes and apricots, a dessert of fresh fruit, and of course, the obligatory mint tea. Well, it's a good thing I stuffed myself on tapas - the aforementioned chicken was sprinkled copiously with almonds. Despite the assurances from the staff that I "could just eat around them!" I decided to opt out of that particular ER visit. All the same, a great dinner.

Today, we began our day after a restless night in a stifling hot hotel room. Somehow, my roommates Jessica and Francie and I ended up with the smallest room and the only one with no windows! I just need to get used to permanent stickiness and sweat. (As of this writing, I have just hopped out of an ice cold shower and am already beginning to sweat). 

Anyway, after a breakfast of Moroccan flatbreads (ahem ROSANNA), frittata  (ahem ROSANNA), coffee, and fresh-squeezed orange juice, we headed over to the IES center here in Fes for our first colloquial Moroccan Arabic class. Any Arabic I took freshman year has completely disappeared from my brain. Oh well, the language is so different here, what I learned in that class probably wouldn't do me that much good.

Class was followed by a 4-course lunch (yes, you read that right, a 4-course lunch):

- Tapas: lentils, cucumber, carrots, bread

- Moroccan soup with chickpeas, rice, lentils, and spiced in a way I can't even describe

(I would just like to note that, in this point of the meal, I was already full)

- Chicken with lemon and olives (YUM)

- Melon

And that was lunch. Now you know why I'll be needing to buy a second seat for my extra girth on the way home.