7:00AM: I normally get up at this time and get ready for classes.
8:00AM: I go for a shouzhuabing at the nearby stand for breakfast and make tea I got on our Saturday trip to the Maliandao tea market to go with it. My classmates are often reviewing and doing last-minute edits to homework.
9:00AM: Classes start with a tingxie (literally, “listen-write”, or a dictation quiz) and the language pledge begins. After we come back from our trip to Xi’an this weekend, the pledge becomes 24/7 as opposed to just from 9am to 4pm.

Last weekend was bliss– we packed in a lot in a short amount of time, so this post is a bit lengthy, but hopefully interesting! We started off the weekend by going out to the Austrian countryside for our program overnight trip– it was nothing short of amazing. First we went to Bad Ischl, a lovely little town where we saw Franz Lehar’s villa (composer of The Merry Widow) as well as the Kaiser Villa (hot vacation spot for them cultured folks, I guess!) We then continued on to Steinbach am Attersee– my future retirement location, I’ve decided.

June 12 was Dia de San Juan de Sahagun, which meant most stores were closed and classes were cancelled.  The night before the holiday, I went to a stunning fireworks show near the Roman bridge.  The area around the bridge as well as the Plaza Mayor were extremely crowded.

Culture shock. We’ve all heard the term, but do we really understand its meaning?

I always thought culture shock was a term to describe adjustment to an unfamiliar environment. I also only expected culture shock to occur, at least for me, in places with extreme differences from America (e.g. Tokyo or Ethiopia). In reality, culture shock is a subcategory of a more universal construct called transition shock.

Prepare to get learnt.

Saturday, I woke up not really sure what I was going to do.  I knew that I had to get falafels from the Marais, on the Jewish street, where they make the best falafels.  This was immediately followed by buying chocolate.  In this particular shop, you could get 100 g of chocolate for 5 euros.  It was difficult to decide what to get, but all of the chocolates I chose were delicious.

There is absolutely no way that 500 words are enough to describe my first week here in Morocco.  There is just so much that happened within the span of a week that it doesn’t even seem like it was just a week ago that I arrived at the Rabat-Salé airport. We spent the first night here in Rabat at the Hotel Balima, which faced the parliament building. That was pretty cool. After that we have stayed with our host families in the city’s medina.

I have a poster on my dorm wall at school that reads, “Isn’t the music sometimes so beautiful it hurts?”  I’ve thought of that question many times before, and this weekend may have been one of the most powerful.