My exam went well today. The listening was the last portion and I don't think I got any of the answers correct, but the test was supposed to get harder and harder so I think that was normal.
So I went to the bathroom after the exam today and when I came out, everyone was gone! And apparently the lunch break was 2.5 hours long!! But I'm very proud of myself. I decided that I needed food and couldn't just stay in the center, so I left and went the way of our tour yesterday because I remember there being a place that our tour guide recommended that had a tasty picture of shwarma on it and I remembered thinking *that didn't take us very long to get here*. So I went that way and I walked like I knew were I was going and eventually ran into people I didn't really want to hang out with, but then ran into some more people and we walked until we passed some people sitting at a cafe and we all piled in and joined them. ...no one noticed that that was definitely a cafe for men only lol but the original group did have one guy in it and they probably just saw the tables outside and sat down without noticing that the rest of the place was filled exclusively with men. And it would have been a little awkward for the garcon to be like *umm, even though you're sitting on the other side of the cafe where there aren't any customers, and you don't understand what I'm saying, we really don't feel comfortable with you paying customers sitting here..*
Anyway I had a nice big lunch for under $2 eggs in a tajin with "laHam" which just means meat - which excludes chicken and fish because everyone knows that only vegetarians eat exclusively flesh other than meat :-p and there was unlimited bread and olives and a little cumin on the side.
Speaking of which, I had a boiled egg with cumin this morning and that is really the way to eat a boiled egg. So much better than pepper!
And on the topic of walking like I new were I was going, Morocco is SO much different than Egypt. And it's also been some years, but still. Way more relaxed dress wise. In Egypt, lots of men and women dressed slutty and especially the hijabi women, because it's only appropriate to look slutty if you're head is covered and bedazzled. And if you weren't wearing a hijab, you were wearing sad clothes and a haircut from the 80's, and not the perky haircuts from the 80s..
But here, no one wears too much makeup or cologne/perfume. People who wear the hijab dress the way you'd expect. Skinny jeans are really big this season among people who don't wear the hijab. And even some people who don't wear the hijab still dress in traditional robes, which never would have happened in Egypt. Moroccans are much more attached to their unique culture than Egypt is.
We had a traditional couscous Friday lunch today which was very happy, and we had a long conversation with our host mom which was nice since we were too tired to really do much talking yesterday.
Best of all, we got our first and only cat call today and it was brief, in French, and we just kept walking like we didn't hear anything and we had somewhere to be, and it was over within seconds. Morocco definitely has a lot of things on Egypt, although Egypt still has a spot in my heart. Morocco will seem a little more enjoyable once we know the local dialect "daarija." We have a 3 hour crash course in it tomorrow so that should go a long way to helping us get around and communicate with our host family and especially our host dad!
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