The Day the Internet Stood Still

Oh, blog delinquency. A proper update with photos is coming - my one excuse is unreliable internet. In fact, this morning Rabat (and the rest of Morocco) redid all of its IP addresses, which meant there was no internet in the entirety of Rabat for several hours this morning.

Can you imagine something like that happening on the Wesleyan campus? Or in New York? Weeley!

Classes continue to provide some funny moments. Last week in MSA we had the vocab word "bantaloonat", Arabized plural of the French word for pants, "pantalon", and my professor in his inter-lingual confusion cautioned us that this was "Fransuzich". My forehead almost hit the desk. This morning in MSA we got on a tangent talking about darija. Apparently, the Moroccan dialect word for freezer (the thing on top of the fridge) is the same as the Syrian dialect word for refrigerator. I have a feeling that somewhere along the line, a Moroccan told a Syrian to put his ice cream in the freezer, and was very displeased to find it completely melted a few hours later. (What effect this had on Arab politics has yet to be investigated.)

The language divide is very real. My host sister's friend Yasmina did an exchange program as a high schooler that took her to Cairo, where she consistently spoke English with the young Egyptians she met because they simply would not have understood her Moroccan darija.

I also have to confess to all the readers at home that I am mildly addicted to a Turkish soap opera, with the Arabic title Wa Tamdy al Ayyam - vaguely translated, "As the Days Go By". I think. The episodes are dubbed from Turkish into Syrian (?) Arabic, so bottom line I understand about 5% of the dialogue. The show involves three main characters who have known each other since childhood, all of whom have at least 2 names and one secret identity. And if you want to see them kiss (which they do frequently when they air in Turkey), you have to look up clips online, since Morocco censors all non-married smooches.

Next time, an audio visual update, god and the internet willing.