So things have certainly gotten busier for me (Kim) since the last post.
I've started French classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Institut Francais in downtown Rabat. The class is very international: There's only one other American; the rest of the students are from Korea, Italy, Turkey, Spain, Iraq/Germany, Ethiopian, etc. Somehow I managed to get through all the assessments and ended up with a group of people who speak much better French than I think I do. Our instructor is from Cameroon, and we all have a nice little "cafe au lait" break together in the morning. I'm hoping for big improvements in my French.
I've also joined a fitness center, and I had my first class yesterday. The instructor is very Moroccan -- "allez! allez! le maximum! encore!" -- so I pushed pretty hard (I tried to pretend I was Connie and very tough, etc.). Suffice to say, I can barely walk today, although I plan to drag myself there again tomorrow.
The fitness center has different times for men and women-- apparently to ensure no interaction between the sexes. Despite the precaution, however, none of the women wore shorts, and only some of the women even wore short sleeves while working out. One woman looked to be wearing long-sleeved pajamas along with her head scarf during our class. But the instructor was, suprisingly enough, a man, and he did not hesitate to touch some of the women (like me) who needed help with the various positions. I'm still trying to sort out how these gender politics work.
Bob, meanwhile, has lined up an Arabic tutor three days a week for nice, long sessions. His tutor is a young professor and graduate of Mohammed VI University, who, in exchange, is working on his English conversation skills with Bob. Between that and his various writing projects, it's business as usual for Bob.
I think the kids are liking school more and more. They seem to be gaining some traction with their French and understanding better what is going in classroom, which makes the day much more interesting and less an exercise in clock-watching. Socially, things are definitely good for them. In fact, both of them had friends over to our house this weekend. That was stressful for us (especially me), since we wanted to reciprocate (and replicate) as much as possible what had been done for us at their homes. Fortunately, Rachida, our maid, may make the best tarte au citron in Morocco, so we had a lovely, still-warm tarte to serve with the coffee, tea, cookies, and fruit salad. (The Moroccan families we know have teatime with crepes and gateau around 5:30-6 p.m. Then they don't serve their children dinner, which is usually something light like a soup, until 8 p.m. -- right before bed. We've been eating dinner later than usual here, but haven't fully adopted this system since, predictably enough and for Tommy especially, it tends to mean a large meal of sweets and a light, light meal of the healthy stuff).
We do, of course, still get some complaints. But at least Tommy has stopped telling us that our decision to send him to a French school was just our way of trying to torture him. And Anna's complaints seem to focus on her difficulty with getting out of bed in the morning, which is hardly a new issue.
Bob has come up with this big incentive plan by giving them "points" for good work at school. Anna, especially, loves this system and has made a big scoresheet for the refrigerator to keep track of all the points. Bob has told the kids that if they get to 100 points before our trip on February 20, they can get pets here (i.e., hamsters or birds), with the understanding that we will have to find them a new home before we leave Morocco (a condition that has not yet been accepted by either kid). I'm not sure we really need any new pets though, since we have already "adopted" what seem to be three stray cats in our neighborhood.
Last Sunday, we took a day trip to a nearby fishing village, Moulay Bousselham (see the sunset photo that Anna took), to check out a well-known and imp
ortant birding area (done with a guide by boat) and to have some delicious fresh fish (I even ate some, and Dad/PopPop would have loved it). The birds nest in a lagoon that is 90% sea water and 10% fresh water, and include corcorans, flamingos, osprey, various ducks, many types of gulls, etc. The village and its spectacular shoreline with a big, dramatic surf have been developed quickly, although improvements in the restroom facilities would still be good.Anna will have to write next time, because she says that this post is, once again, too long. We are going to add some photos, however, since Bob says that photos are the most important part of the post.
Les photos: From El Jadida (1) the 16th Century Portuguese cisterne (the site for Orson Welles' film, Othello), (2) children getting rides on the beach (there were camels too), and (3) Kim and Anna strolling along.
Last photo: Tommy listening closely to our birding guide in Moulay Bousselham (the trip was a bit too long).
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