Haliwa bizaaf!

The active and passive participles in Arabic are like a really crazy puzzle. The dual form that verbs and nouns take is really exciting and changes based on case. This is what I've been learning for a week. We're going to have a lecture on the movie Casablanca tomorrow in Arabic. It's the third in our six-part weekly Arabic lectures, and they've been quite fun so far.

Hanane still is not home. Mother and her friends have been making haliwa (sweets) bizaaf (lots) nonstop for days and have now started to fry and bake them accordingly, as if the smell of raw sweet dough wasn't bad enough, now the smell of the various cooking methods is traceable from the street. Mother has been giving me sweets as part of my breakfast. Oddly enough, despite the monotony, breakfast is my favorite meal of the day here. It is always bread, butter, apricot jam, and coffee. The only differences are whether milk and sugar are present and the occasional haliwa.

I have my two papers to write up in the next two weeks. For culture, I've decided to write about linguistic identity here in Morocco and for gender I will write about women and child bearing/motherhood. I got my registration done for fall semester at BU (Arabic V, adv oral expression in French, the linguistic concept of 'focus', intro to phonology, and historical linguistics).

We students are trying to plan to do something for Easter but I'm not sure how it will work out. None of us really have kitchen access, and only the sketch church has services in English, so we may just have to go without.