Life has Begun

So we get catcalled. A lot. But my favorite, as you know, is when guys who watch us go by on the street just say the only English words they know (which might be cuss words) or the first thing that comes to mind, like this guy the other day who looked at me quizzically and said: A-RAbot! (Rabat!) to which I responded: SaH (Correct!) and walked on.

So my host father thinks he's funny that he can't speak English. Or Hebrew. But he tries. Our conversations with him consist of two word sentences, him responding in French, us nodding and smiling, him attempting to dredge up some word from his Hebrew lexicon, failing, but thinking that the French word that he's repeating over and over again is eventually going to make sense to us, and then laughing. Oh and yesterday he came out without his shirt on. I think he was trying to find it. But our host(grand)father is not a small man in circumference, and Lisa could NOT stop laughing though (silently, alhumdulilah) though I, ever the stoic, remained stonyfaced.

We went to "Cyber" on Saturday night since we don't have Internet in our house. Not the one near the house ("Sakana," warned our host sister), the one near the synagogue, which, by the by, you wouldn't know was a synagogue if there weren't an armed guard and men saying Kiddush Levana in their kippot outside. Good cover, Jews of Rabat. Anyway, at Cyber it took 10 minutes to load the computer and for us to realize that the keyboard was in French so that a "Q" is where the "A" should be and the ";" is where the "M" should be. It was rough. And then I realized I had to pee. Desperately. I asked the teenage guy at the desk -- who must have thought it was hilarious to watch American girls poking his keyboards -- if there was a "beit al-maa", he said "wee" and proceeded to show me the Turkish bathroom (=hole in the floor). That wasn't going to happen. So I grabbed my roommate, paid for our time, and we RAN to the hotel down the block. A blessing on French toilets.

Bon Iver is your artist of the day. I've been listening to him quite a bit lately, and its just the sort of sad, beautiful music that I love any time of day. This song- and the video is appropriate, I think- is called Wolves (Act I and III).