Day 1

I had my first experience of being able to confront a stranger for talking about me in Arabic. It was pretty much the most satisfying thing ever. I was eavesdropping on three Saudis in the security line at Frankfurt. They mentioned the girls in front of them (including me). I was standing with my back to them, but they must have known I had checking them out (trying to figure out if they were Yemeni).
In Arabic, one of them said- "Look at this one, she's not scared of me."
"Which one?" his friend said.
"This one, the girl with the green eyes." He said.
"What about me?" I said to him. They were all shocked and his friends started laughing at him.
"She speaks Arabic!"
I told them I was sorry for listening to their conversation, but they said they were the ones that were sorry for talking about me.
We talked about Morocco and Yemen a little bit. They were really nice and ended up being on the same plane to Casa Blanca.

During the flight I met Hisham, a Moroccan man returning home. He spoke to me in perfect fusHa and told me where all the best beaches in Morocco are. After talking for most of the flight, I asked him about the situation between Morocco and Western Sahara. I later found out that this is considered a sensitive topic that maybe shouldn't be broached, but I am glad I learned that afterward because he had some interesting things to say. He considers it part of Morocco because of the strong similarities between religion, language, culture, etc. We talked about the Polisario and the difficulties surrounding Western Sahara's independence.
We finally got to Meknes at 4am, exhausted beyond description. We slept in the riad at the college, which looked to us like an Orientalist painting come to life. We met our host families in the morning. I got introduced to bastila and my host family couldn't be nicer. More on that later...