I made it alive! It took two days on three planes and one train, and my luggage got lost, but now I'm here and so are my bags. Everyone told me to ride the train first class, but when I got here I forgot and I bought a second class ticket because that's what you get if you don't specify. I was able to go back to the counter and upgrade it to a first class ticket, which gave me an unreasonable degree of confidence in my Arabic.

I arrived in Fez at 2 in the morning sunday, and the AHA director met me at the train station and took me to my hotel. The hotel was really nice, but I only got to sleep for a few hours before I had to meet him in the morning. He showed me around Fez all day except for a nap in the afternoon. Fez is pretty incredible. I think what I've been told is that it's the largest medieval city in the Arab world, and even if it's not the medieval section of the city is very large. the streets are very narrow so cars can't enter, and they're packed with people shopping and mules carrying goods around. It's kind of an awful place to be a foreigner, because you stand out pretty badly, and there is enough tourism here that people are very well practiced at ripping them off. Just to set everyone's minds at ease, nothing horrible has happened to me. I've just been overcharged for a few things. I tried to add a picture of the medieval city or of the walls surrounding it but I can't figure out how to upload pictures from my phone right now, so hopefully I'll be able to do a big post with a lot of pictures later.

Classes are going well. It turns out I'm only taking modern Standard Arabic and no Moroccan, which is fine. The level is appropriate for me, and it's clear that by the end of this I really will have gotten a full year's worth of Arabic instruction. There are only four of us in my class, so we've been doing most things together. There's a girl from Hawaii, a girl from North Carolina, and a guy from (German) Switzerland.

I apologize for the brevity, but this is pretty difficult on my phone. I'll post again later, hopefully from a computer so that I can show you the photos I've taken.