market, new language, and field trip

so much has happen since the last time that i've posted.

thursday was suk (market) day. pretty much the entire area closes down and everyone goes to the market. you can find almost anything there... watches, jeans, scarfs, popcorn, spices, etc. there were hundreds of people there, a little overwhelming, but very interesting. we were taught how to barter and purchuse items in arabic. fortunatly, we still had the help of our LCF (language culture facilitaor)if we forgot how to say certian words. i really need to learn my numbers, it's holding me back a lot. i looked at scarfs, but i didn't find any that i really loved. instead i bought a pair of sweatpants, because i forgot to bring all of mine.

yesterday we also found out what language we are going to be learning. (this is the one that we will be speaking at our site... learning arabic was more of an assigned side project). i will be learning tasheheit (a berber language mostly spoken in central to southern morocco). tasheheit is not a written language on it's own, they use arabic script (which is why we were learning arabic script). we started learning basic words and pharses today. i think it's a bit harder than arabic, but tasheheit uses a lot of arabic words for many things.

tomorrow is our first field trip. i will be traveling to sour, morocco (pronounced sore). i will be at a site with one other trainee and we are assigned to stay with a volunteer. we will stay with the volunteer for two nights and our first host family for two nights. hopefully it will give us a good perspective on how life as a volunteer would be, it's also meant to get us excited about learning the language (once we discover that it's impossible to function in the community without knowledge of the langage). anyway, there's much more for me to do today. by the way, i'm loving handwashing my laundry. i hate doing laundry in the states, but there's something calming about handwashing.

signing off from the land of the cold sun (again without access to spell check... sorry).