October in Morocco

The month of October flew by in a whirlwind. My brain has been overloaded the last few weeks due to intensive arabic immersion, dealing with the logistics of becoming a Moroccan resident, and constant travel. To summarize, the themes of the month for October were:
1) TRAVEL 2) LANGUAGE 3) CARTE DE SEJOUR

TRAVEL: I have travelled about 25,000 Kilometers in the last month. I somehow made it back to the US only 1.5 months after arriving in Morocco, not to mention my heavy travel schedule here in Morocco. In the last 5 days alone I have been in Fes, Casablanca, Rabat, Sale, and Marrakesh. With Dana coming this weekend to visit, the travel schedule isn't going to ease up anytime soon :)

LANGUAGE: I would be a great guineau pig for a language acquisition research project. Every day here I speak four languages. My Moroccan Arabic is getting REALLY good...I went a whole day yesterday without using any other language! This was my goal for month four here and I hit it at only 2 months..elhamdullilah!! Unfortunately, I am now unable to speak Classical Arabic (Fus-ha) without using Moroccan words and I realized this week that in my Fus-ha class I am now THINKING in Moroccan and translating to Fus-ha instead of thinking in English to Fus-ha. My French also gets better every day and my English, well, it keeps getting worse. Pretty soon I am going to start writing these posts in another language.

CARTE DE SEJOUR: After 6 trips to the police station, hours of hassle/paperwork/photocopies/notarization, SUZANNE MAYER is officially a resident of Morocco. My god...can you imagine my face when I saw that on my carte de sejour which I worked so hard to get had the wrong name on it? I'm going back tomorrow and inshallah it will be fixed in about a month :)

That was my October in Morocco! An exciting, amazingly intense, and rewarding month!