Category: Africa

Midterms, boo! Festival, yay!!

So, this whole STUDY abroad thing has finally caught up to me. So far the trip has felt like an extended vacation with a few weekly seminars thrown in here and there, but tomorrow I have an Arabic midterm AND I have to give a presentation in my CORE class. Both on the same day–I know right?

The reason they’re both on the same day like that is because we’re skipping class on Thursday to head to Essaouira for a famous musical festival (www.festival-gnaoua.net) that will take place all weekend. Until I started googling it I wasn’t too psyched about going… sometimes I get in these moods where I’m more of a homebody and just lounge in bed all weekend which is kind of what I wanted to do…  but after yesterday’s lecture on Gnawa music and a little bit of Youtubing… I am SO TOTALLY PSYCHED to go to this festival! Not to mention we’re staying in a hotel and I love staying in hotels :)

Awwww man they sure get down around the 3 minute mark!! Anyway that’s enough procrastinating I think, feel free to watch the awesome video and be jealous of me. Back to paper writing.

Also, I’m coming home one month from tomorrow. Pretty depressing but kind of a relief :)

Sick! Oh, and Music

I’m only kind of sick but its still irritating. I had a stomachache all morning and now I have a splitting headache. The original plan was to take a nap as soon as I got home from school, but I have an Arabic midterm that I need to study for (the test is Wednesday) and a 5 page paper also due Weds that I was unaware of. LAME… but such is school. I am thinking back fondly upon the days when summer break was really just for relaxing. I’m talking about the days before summer school and for that matter, summer jobs. Can I be 16 again?

Anyway, time to study Arabic. There is so much I don’t know, but the amount of words I’m given each night are really way too many to learn in such a short time.

Anyway today, for part of our class, we visited a recording studio and the producer there gave us small lecture about Moroccan music–traditional stuff and modern stuff. We watched a video by my prof’s niece Nabyla (who, according to the lecturer is one of the only distinctly Moroccan artists to achieve mainstream popularity here–most popular Moroccan artists are hip-hop). Moroccan music has influenced musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and yes, Led Zeppelin!

Here’s a video that my computer won’t play for me (javascript is having issues and I am none too pleased about it) but this is one song in particular he was talking about today influenced by Moroccan music.

Lack of Update

I really don’t want to miss a day of updating, but I always feel lame and cheap if I just put something (such as this) so as to “update” with my lack of anything to say.

Today for class we went to the archaeological museum, which had a lot of interesting things but kind of seemed like it’d been built in the 1970s and not updated since. Not that I was around in the 70s. But I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by going to really cool museums in the US that are all about fancy lighting and laser security systems and two inch thick glass and stuff. I mean there were these skeletons, a couple of the earliest complete skeletons found in the region, and if I had a mind to I could have reached down into the enclosure and touch them. Obviously this was out of the question, but a layer of vaccuum-sealed 2 inch glass would have made it even more out of the question.

I most certainly was not supposed to take this picture. Sneaky sneaky, flash set to "off!"
I most certainly was not supposed to take this picture. Sneaky sneaky, flash set to "off!"

The thing I found most interesting about the museum was the huge quantity of Roman artifacts found in all corners of Rabat. It really drove home to me how wide the span and influence of the Roman Empire really had been. I mean, you think about it in Europe and it sounds normal enough. Famous stories of Romans in Egypt, sure. Israel? Of course. But Morocco? More surprising and interesting, I think.