Ok, I'm posting this from a computer, so this should be easier (even though the keyboard is wonky and french).

So the first Saturday after classes there was a tour in the medieval city that most of us went on. The coolest part was an old religious school that we got to visit, because the decorations were really intricate and gorgeous. We also got to see the outdoor vats where they dye leather, which was kind of interesting but also smelled about as foul as you would expect hides soaking in lime to smell. The rest of the tour was, unfortunately, that whole the-tour-guide-has-a-deal-with-the-vendor kind of B.S. that has been a part of every tour I've ever been on, but the ratio of actually interesting sightseeing to trying to rip us off was really unfavourable on this one.

Sunday was a lot more fun. We got to go to some Roman ruins called Volubilis near the town of Meknes. It was the first time I had a chance to see Roman ruins, and people who had been to other sites said that the mosaics on the floors were very well preserved. I was a little surprised at the freedom we had to climb all over a lot of the ruins, but we were kept off the mosaics. After the ruins, we went into Meknes for a brief tour. We visited an old fortress from when Meknes was a capital, as well as a mosque, which was really cool since I'm pretty sure that active mosques in Morocco are closed to non-Muslims, so it was nice to get a chance to see the inside of one. Something they pointed out was the use of Roman-looking pillars inside the mosque, which is something I definitely don't remember seeing in pictures of mosques in Iran, for example.

The most interesting part of the trip by far, though, was the synagogue we got to visit. It wasn't on the schedule, but a Jewish guy in our group was really excited about the possibility of visiting this synagogue because his dad used to work there, so they said we could swing by and see if they were open. When we got there, we were greeted by an ancient man in Hebrew, and we were only able to get in because the guy who pushed the trip was able to respond in good Hebrew and gloss over the fact that most of us were not Jewish. The inside of the synagogue was kept in pretty good condition, but it definitely had a disused feeling to it, which turned out to be accurate. The man who greeted us had us sit down, then he went to pulpit (or whatever the proper term is), pulled out an old notebook, and started reciting from it in Hebrew while our instigator translated for us. He was reciting the history of that particular synagogue, but the way he did it almost felt like a religious sermon. According to the notebook, there was a community of 20,000 Jews in Meknes, and the synagogue was the religious center of the community, a place where its poor members could come for help, and a school for teaching its children Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. In 1955, the majority of the community moved to Israel, and there are now 5 families remaining in Meknes, numbering some 20 persons, all of whom are quite old.

After he finished, we were allowed to explore the synagogue a bit and to see the old, old, (I forget how old) Torah scroll they had, which they can no longer use because some of the letters have been obliterated, and they don't have someone qualified to reinscribe it anymore. They also don't have enough people to do the formal communal prayer, so the synagogue is maintained exclusively for Jewish tourists. I'm struggling to come up with a good way to express what it felt like to be in that space.

The weekend after that, last weekend, was more touristy fun, this time in the Sahara desert! We drove south for ages and ages, about eight hours, watching things get steadily more arid out the window. We spent Friday night in a faaaancy hotel in what must surely have qualified as desert, but didn't have the iconic sand or anything. As much as I've liked the homestay, it was fun to eat food made with tourists in mind and have some wine (shhhh). We didn't take off from the hotel until about noon the next day, in order to time things out so that by the time we were under the sun in the dunes it was on its way out. We had to drive another two hours or so, and then we started to see the dunes we'd been looking for since we set off. We went to a hotel to drop off most of our stuff, suncreened up, covered our heads and faces with scarves to help with the sun and the sand, and took off into the desert on camels. It's kind of an interesting arrangement. There's definitely a tourism industry around these desert treks, since there were several hotels right on the edge of the dunes and the Amazigh guys who handled the camels and took us to the oasis camp we spent the night at said that they had different groups out there every night.

It took about two hours to get to the camp, but I have no idea what that means in terms of distance or anything. Riding the camel was not my favorite thing in the world. They're good at what they do, though; the shape of their feet works kind of like a snowshoe on the sand, so they're a lot more efficient on it than we are. That being said, they're slow, and they make weird noises, and they are SO not shaped like something you should be riding, which is compounded by the way they rock while they walk. Not for me. In fact, as beautiful and interesting as it was, I don't think the desert is for me. I could just be bitter because everybody wanted to climb up this huge dune right behind the camp in order to see the sunset, which sounded like a great idea until you realized how much worse the inefficiency of walking in loose sand is when you're going up a steep hill. I was one of the few who made it to the top, but then I threw up, so I don't get to be proud of myself. Also, we couldn't see the sunset and it was too dark to get a good picture from up there. Oh well.

In the morning we got our freshly bruised inner thighs back on the camels and headed back to the hotel. We set out pretty early, again because of the sun, so it wasn't unbearably hot. This is where the interesting part of the trip ends, as the rest of it was trying desperately to wash sand out of our ears and hair and driving for ten hours back to Fez. Actually, the drive itself was a tad interesting just because Sunday happened to be the first day of Ramadan, and the driver was definitely fasting, because he was a major grumpus the whole way back, and pulled some *ahem* brave stuff on the curvy mountain roads. We did get home in excellent time, though.

Speaking of which, Ramadan. We had an optional lecture on Ramadan in Morocco about a week before it started, and that as well as everything else people said about Ramadan made it out to be a bigger deal than it is I think. Apparently Ramadan has a different social weight in Morocco than in other places. We were given examples of people fasting when they were sick, for example, or encouraging their kids to fast younger than scripture says they have to. I haven't witnessed anything like that, but I'm definitely not eating or drinking in the street. Actually, the pre-pubescent son in my homestay family has fasted some days, but that seems to be him trying to emulate the family more than any sort of pressure on him from them.

I've glossed over my classes again, but there's really not that much to say about them. I'm learning a ton of Arabic, hooray! I've also failed to upload pictures again, and I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to get that to work, but if you have a facebook you can add me and see my pictures on there. Lunchtime! Have a good one.