Life continues at it's slow pace here in training. I have language classes from 8-5:30 daily and then go home to more informal language lessons as well as some tough love in terms of host family cultural/etiquette lessons. This past week I have decided that I really needed to figure out how to make the "3' " sound in arabic. Which as far as I am concerned equates to a roll of an rrr in the back of your throat. It may seem simple, but trust me my throat doesn't work that way. The other day the entire family and neighbors were sitting with me saying word after word that contained that exact sound. The activities resulted in a weird hacking sound and a very sore throat for me, and a hilarious spectacle for them. However, I have found a few muscles in my throat I never knew existed and accept that as a success. I have faith that the hacking may someday turn into something less growly :)

Today our training group learned to shop and cook for ourselves here. It was quite the show. Us prancing around the souq (market place), a far cry from any grocery store I have ever been to in the states. A place where vegetables are haggled for and prices are in ryals (bizzare fractions of our normal Moroccan currency the dirham), things are sold by the kilo (how much is even in a kilo?!??!) and haggling is normal (bizzare when I am supposed to haggle that $1 is too much for 7 tomatos). My favorite stop was when we had to order beef. For those of us in America who get beef in a nice, clean, plastic wrapped container this was a shock! So the meat seller in the souq consists of a shop in front of which two huge carcasses are strung (you can tell which kind of animal is sold at each shop by the shape of the dead meat outside of it... pleasant right?) then the butcher goes and hacks off a chunk for you, depending on which type you want and grinds it up right in front of you!

We decided to cook mexican food which turned out pretty good even though we had to make a few Moroccan substitutes :) Then last night I also learned from a PCV (peace corps volunteer) who has been here for a year already, how to make cookies without brown sugar(which does not exist in morocco). I wish our camera had been working and I could share with you the comical scene of me and Joli (PCV) "blending" the dough with our hands, while all of the Moroccans ( 1 mother, 2 daughters, a young son, and our teacher) all sat on small stools on the floor of the roof we were cooking on watching as we stumbled through the process :)

My host family is still good, and after a week dedicated to the past tense verbs I am now an expert at explaining what I have done, now we just have to tackle those tricky details of how to transition that into present and (gasp) future activities. But as they say... shwiya b shwiya (little by little )