i'm in morocco bitch

hi hiiiiii to all of my avid followers here at alajnabia, i.e. the (female) foreigner for all y'all who for some ungodly reason are not studying arabic or have not read my entire blog from the beginning (RECOMMENDED). i still like that picture of sana'a and my catchy heading so i think i'm gonna leave that up...forever. i am (un)fortunately (not sure which one) not back in yemen, but rather studying arabic in fes, morocco this summer. as usual, there are a lot of things i like about it and a few things i don't. to start with the negatives, basically i don't like walking around by myself (especially in the old city, where i live) because you get a lot of harassment from fake guides and of course moroccan men. while i'm sure that many moroccan men are solid peeps (like my host dad), the street creepers specialize in whispering unsettling things to you once you have JUST passed them and they are out of your field of vision...aka they specialize in being wimps. i think that they must take a class or something because they are way too good at being scumbags. thus far, i have refrained from murdering anyone but it's been close a few times. i haven't heard much aside from the occasional "beautiful" or "ghazaala" (gazelle) lately because i walk with my host fam when i go out in the medina (old city), but on my first day here i was told "you are a jew. only jews say that" (when i said "please leave me alone," or perhaps some less polite version, to a fake guide). when i later tried the avoidance tactic, the nicest thing the kid said to me was that he saw me in a porn. he added a bunch more after that. not sure why they haven't invoked the death penalty for working as a fake guide, but i'm thinking of starting a campaign. now that i have made myself angry again...on to the good stuff! :) great to be out of the US and sorta back in africa/sorta back in the middle east. i landed in casablanca and went straight to rabat, where i had a busy couple of days attending the mawazine music festival (saw scorpion and lenny kravitz) and visiting Zhour Ghourram at the university of kuneitra (north of rabat). Zhour is a professor/writer who visited Michigan last fall. i hope to get back to rabat to actually explore the city a bit, so we'll see if i have time. then, hopped over to fes on the train (train system is GREAT) where i stayed at the funky fes hostel a few nights. this was refreshing as i had to stay in a rando shitty hotel with a shared hole toilet in rabat since everything was full (i didn't realize the music festival was going on). in fes, i allowed myself the luxury of hanging out with some rad foreigners for a couple days (exploring the medina/eating out/smoking sheesha and drinking on the terrace at night/watching magic tricks) and got very jealous of some crazy traveling folks. buttttt, i'm sure i'll do that in the future and for now i'm glad to be in one spot. i moved in with a host family in the medina about a week ago, and they are WONDERFUL! host dad mohammed (supriiiiise), host mom saeeda, host sis khoula (14), and host bro mohammed (8). the food is amazing, host mom does my laundry (occasionally she lets me help, but usually she argues with me until i give up), we go out in the medina together and visit friends, the dad is a honey trader and his stuff's amazing, and i have free stolen internet that's better than some internet connections i've had in the states. i talk a lot with saeeda and khoula and they're very open-minded, sincere, sweet, funny, etc etc. bro mohammed likes to grab my iPhone out of my hands to play games and occasionally shuts my computer screen when i'm skyping. seyy mohammed (pops) like to grill up kafta in the living room and fill the entire house with smoke. khoula LOVES turkish soap operas and gets so excited when explaining the plot lines that i don't understand anything. i'm studying the moroccan dialect at alif (arabic language institute in fes) right now, and combined with my practice at home i feel like i'm learning a good amount. but, i definitely cannot understand moroccan speech at a normal rate (or even most things at a mucho slowed-down rate). i get along pretty well in the house though using a nice mix of moroccan, levantine, modern standard, yemeni, and occasionally egyptian arabic (which i'd say is probably the closest thing that i know to moroccan, but still not close at all). ok well i haven't had my post-lunch nap yet so i think i'll stop here for now. i'm not sure if it's the heat or just something about fes, but i nap at least once a day here and occasionally twice. perhaps this is why i haven't been very productive so far... ma3 hobb bizzaaf, addie

oh right, i have a blog.

i think that since i'm working on 3 papers due in 4 days, this is the perfect time to write my first blog post in alf months. i'm not sure if anyone reads this anymore (if you do, YAY), but as i'm sure i've said numerous times up in herr this is mostly for future me. i am now an arabic linguistics ph.d. student (WEIRD) at the university of michigan. sounds like i know what i'm doing? no. but that's ok, i am most enjoying doing whatever i'm doing. since this blog is public i probably should not get into the problems that i am having with certain people who have a close academic relationship to me, but aside from that i'm really enjoying my classes and not working 9-5 anymore. akboob is enjoying it too, although she still gets mad at me and pees on my bed from time to time...for old time's sake. i clean my sheets when she does this...usually. she is currently looking very cute with her new short summer haircut and a handkerchief that probably annoys her and rubs against her neck, but it's cute so it's staying on. she's still a psychopath who attacks rottweilers at the dog park, but i'm not really one to talk about aggression. i live with an eclectic mix of individuals in a house next to the stadium (which is convenient, since football is my thang), including my pharmacology ph.d. student landlord, marie (his mom and my bff/house mom), wallflower...ok he's such a wallflower that i just forgot his name...wow i live with this person...ummm...i'll come back to it, a younger dominican kid anthony, an akita named tomo with a skin infection who has to be bathed in oil every week, and a very shy lab mix named princess who has the most human eyes i've ever seen...on a dog. well, now that i can see akboob's eyes (since they trimmed her massive eyebrows), they are pretty human too. she still has her lovely overbite, they failed to trim her vagina beard unfortunately...can't believe i paid $45. NEIL. omg neil. ok good that was bugging me. also, i have a new bff, kim, who is attached to my hip and we are basically each other's only friends here (in a good way). well, we hang with other people, but we are getting so old and disillusioned and judgmental that it's hard for us to meet people we like. but we tell ourselves that it's their fault...perhaps somewhere in between. we both like electronic music, we both have hondas, i copy her clothes and perfume and jewelry, we try to work out, we both love food, and she cooks me delicious dinners sometimes. OH and she got me hooked on dexter. i think these are the most important elements of our friendship. oh, and she also studies arabic and is getting her master's from the center for middle eastern and north african studies...word. and we're going to see a movie tonight, so i better make myself look presentable and try to hide the fact that i haven't showered today with a hat/perfume.

hope that was interesting, you old lazy fart addie sitting reading your own blog posts from 50 years ago, zoomed in so far that only 2 words fit on the screen at any given moment. i hope you didn't pussy out and start to get easily offended (i doubt it, but if you did i'm sorry). i hope that you married dan and had a bussfull of gabies, who are now taking excellent care of you by putting you in the ritziest nursing home around. also, i hope dan is sitting next to you in his matching wheel chair with ranch all over his face from the ranch martinis you share all day every day. if this is blurry, you should probably switch to just sipping ranch on its own. HI GAN!!!!!

love,
me

things i think about

i guess i should start posting randomly about whatever's on my mind, to get into the habit of sharing my useless thoughts with others through this blog. things that i'm interested in shift very rapidly (too rapidly for me to ever become highly skilled or gain expertise in anything), so it would be nice to have a record later on to at least see what i thought of trying to become involved in and/or accomplish. i guess arabic is a nice constant, and i suppose many people don't even have that, but i feel like by now i should also be a skilled piano player or a seasoned swimmer or a competitive breakdancer or at least be able to whistle. so, basically, judging from this post i am currently interested in the idea of becoming interested in something. can i be an expert in that? perhaps this is already my expertise.

does this post even make sense? bedtime.

oops

well, i haven't posted on my blog in about a year. i left yemen in august 2010, as most of you (if anyone is reading this) probably know, and i forgot most of what happened from may-august in yemen. well, i do have memories and remember certain trips, events, etc, but i'm not sure that i can blog about it with much clarity so i will refrain. in the end, i was pretty sick of yemen and fed up with being stared at and men mumbling things under their breath at me. i was getting pretty aggressive and yelling at random men in the street, so it was probably for the best that i left. i have told people that if i was a man i would probably still be there, and i still believe it to be true. i spoke with my boss at amideast (the best boss in the history of time, as i'm realizing more and more) about taking on a few more responsibilities and becoming an employee fo realsies, so i would probably still be there if i had junk. but i don't, and while i miss a lot of things about yems (including yemeni and foreign friends) and definitely plan to return, i don't regret my decision.

i will give a quick recap of the past 8+ months post-yemen. i'm becoming a big fan of lists lately, as liz and elisa have recently discovered, and if you don't like it...go read a blog by somebody less interesting. list:

-returned to pittsburgh in august while accompanying my 18 (ish) YES high school exchange students (and AKBOOB) to the US. my students are the coolest. i hope to see them all again (YAY) in about a month when they're in DC for their re-entry orientation, and am excited to see how much they've all changed. as expected and judging from their facebook stuff, including a profile picture of one of the boys with arms around two girls wearing strapless dresses at prom, they've changed lot.

-saw my beloved family and my yanala!!!! hung around pittsburgh being lazy and useless for a little while. oh also, we went to south haven, MI for our family vacation which was dope, as usual. highlights include good quality brewskies, uncle tom making ribs (pooorkkkkk mmm), beach, beer, young cousin steven with his highly developed and subtle sense of humor, teaching my cousins to make hideously ugly faces, encouraging cousins to do their eyebrow exercises, wearing summer clothes, grandma meals, inflatable boats, beer, and doing absolutely nothing productive. going again this august!

-after sufficient post-return pittsburgh laziness and half-heartedly applying for real jobs here and there, i got a job as a busser at casbah. not really much different from how it sounds. i got discounts on a bunch of restaurants owned by big burrito restaurant group and ate a lot of free/discounted food at casbah as well. i made some money. i cleared some shit from people's tables. it was ok brainless work for a while, and i made some good friends and hung out with my fam and homies. i went to LA at some point in there to visit victoria and others, which was good times. that's about it.

-in december i got a REAL PERSON job in DC working as a program assistant at american councils for international education. i was very excited, and still enjoy the job as i have some great coworkers who i've bonded and gossiped with, but i don't love working in an office. i was hired for my middle east expertise (yeah, what up) to work on the near east and south asia undergrad (NESA UGRAD) exchange program, but most of my work is actually on other programs for students and professionals in/from kazakhstan, kyrgyzstan, tatarstan, tajikistan, belarus...mostly stans. we don't get to interact much with the students, of course (since they're not in DC for the most part), and it's mostly admin. one thing i really enjoyed was the NESA UGRAD re-entry orientation in fayetteville at the university of arkansas. the students are of course the greatest part of international ed jobs, and it was great to meet the kids and speak some arabic with them! mostly arabs, but the program also includes students from india, nepal, pakistan, and...one other place i forget. and fayetteville has the most awesome bar in the universe, smoke and barrel tavern, which is almost worth going there itself. games, bluegrass, hippies, lesbians, businesspeople, good beer, dancing skanks, suave metro young professionals, etc etc.

-wow this isn't really a list so much as paragraphs separated by dashes instead of indentations

-I GOT INTO THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S NEAR EASTERN STUDIES PH.D. PROGRAM!!!!!!!!!!!!! i will be starting in the fall, studying either arabic linguistics and pedagogy (according to my app/interview) or something totally useless like pre-islamic poetry from the arabian peninsula (LOVE IT). really really excited. as i said, i'm already sick of my office job. i only applied to three schools and didn't get in to austin (probably my first pick) or georgetown (my georgetown prof asked me why i didn't get in. i was like...um...), but i think/hope this was for a reason. michigan invited me for recruitment weekend, everyone was very nice and welcoming, i got a FLAS fellowship, and am now very happy about it. ann arbor is really cute and i've got some really good leads on apartments with hippy liberals. akboob is coming.

-i love ron swanson. see: http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/110120/park-recs-pyramid_1500.jpg

-i went to ultra music festival in miami back in march with scott. it was amazingly phenomenal, and i may or may not be slightly obsessed with electronic music now. our hostel was amazing. ohana...def stay there if you go. like arkansas bar, almost worth it just for this. $25/night includes all meals, meeting lots of cool people, pool table, short walk to beach, lots of partying at night, clean rooms, etc. met some awesome people, most notably two insanely fun irish guys and a hilariously ridiculous italian.

-i am going back to pittsburgh in june for my lovely yana's graduation from LAW SCHOOL!!!!!! i love yana and she is a genius.

-dan is still my soul mate and marriage plans are always in the making.

-i want to get malevich's white on white square on my foot. also, i need to find an arabic calligrapher because i need about 12323892380209 lines of poetry by antara tattooed on my body.

-hmmmm can't think of other things.

-oh wait, i forgot to tell you (future me) about my house. i'm living in a gorgeous and huge house in logan circle with 5 guys. i live in a large closet with lofted bed for $700/month which is totally amazing and great price for this location. i walk to work in dupont every morning/evening. the dog park is 2 blocks away and we usually go twice a day. this neighborhood is pretty awesome, and my favorite gay dive bar with cheap drinks, DELISH food, and leather daddies is also only a few blocks away.

OK well i am getting bored of writing and actually need to think in order to come up with things to say now, so i think that's a sign to stop. BUT, i promise i will come back sooner this time. i think i'm too lazy to change the name of my blog, which is appropriate given the subtitle. also, it took me a while to get it looking so ridiculously aesthetically pleasing.

سلام

may

so may was a pretty good month. still sick of being stared at and generally hate walking around, but otherwise, i like yemen. i was actually talking to my yemeni coworker today about this, and saying that perhaps i should wear the niqab, but she said it won't make a difference. i thought she meant because people will still know i'm a foreigner, but she said no, just because i'm a woman. i don't mind walking around in the old city as much, or with my friends, but i think the solution is for me to make enough money to take taxis all the time...if i want to stay here. taking taxis is usually alright, and you almost always have the pleasure of listening to akon.

i've been mostly hanging out with foreigners this month, with some mohammed al-khouja here and there. oliver has been gone (in britain and ny, coming back in 4 days!!!), so i've mostly been with his old housemates, amina (italian), stephan (norweigan), and brian (american/fake irish). we've been on a few trips, first to manakha (without stephan, and before the kidnappings), then to kamaran. i have already been to manakha, in the haraz mountains southwest of sanaa, but last time i was sick from eating sushi in kamaran the day before. we went on long walks/sort-of-hikes on thursday and friday, and it was very beautiful (will inshallah post pictures to facebook). on thursday, brian and i drank tea with an old couple in a tiny village on the mountainside between manakha and hajjarah, who lived in an adorable house and offered us some freshly picked qat from their field. after meeting amina, we continued on to the village of hajjarah, where we were invited to a wedding and were offered more food than i've ever seen before...meat, shafoot, bint assakhin, spongey bread (forget what they call it here), vegetables, chicken, mushakal, bananas, etc etc etc. then we walked around the mountains for 3-4 hours. we unfortunately decided to stay in the hotel on the right (of the two main ones), when the one on the left is nicer and the staff are much cooler/less annoying, but ohhhh well. the food was good and we got to make fun of a group of american mountain bikers playing guitar and singing "sweet home alabama" sitting in their room all night...cringy. on friday, we actually did a bit of real hiking (to cahill), followed by some not-so-real hiking along a path up the mountain. we also visited hotayb, an ismaili village that seems extremely out-of-place, modern, and clean among the old mountain villages that surround it. the people there also seem out-of-place, sulaimani bohras (a sect of ismailis) with clean white robes and mutadayyin beards. many are pilgrims visiting from india or pakistan. we ended up coming back to sanaa with a rich family we met outside hotayb...flagged them down, they took us to see their village, bought us qat, took us to our hotel to get our stuff, payed off our peugeot driver who claimed that we had to go back with him and had agreed ("inshallah" is not agreeing) and refused to take our money for this, and drove us all the way back to sanaa listening to the genius of the backstreet boys and akon. good times. brian and i also managed to chew qat a total of 5 days that week...a few times in sanaa, in the peugeot there (obvi), both thursday and friday while walking/hiking (always offered to us), and of course on the trip back.

the following weekend, we went to kamaran island. stephan came along this time, along with jessica (who works with me), her boyfriend, and their friends (mostly yemeni, one american who has been living here for a while)...9 of us altogether. the ride there in the peugeot was quite cozy, with me, amina, and brian in the far back, and stephan basically half-way out the window with 3 others in the middle row. we arrived in hodeidah, a port city south of kamaran and in my opinion the lattakia (a**hole) of yemen, in the afternoon on thursday. hodeidah is probably the most humid place i've ever been, my redface was out of control, and even amina (who does not sweat) was sweating. we ate at a restaurant near the fish market, which was quite delicious and i ate both fish and shrimp (i don't like fish). then, we took a very cooozzzy van to salif, the port city close to kamaran, and a boat to kamaran. being hot and sweaty is probably one of my least favorite things in life, and i was in grumpy bitch-mode by the time we arrived. we walked left after arriving on kamaran toward the cheaper "hotel" (a guy with 4 huts), past the huts, and to a beach where brian and amina stayed last time they were here. we argued a bit with the police (i think) who told us that we had to stay in the hotel, but in the end we just ate lunch at the hotel the next day and paid the guy a bit for letting us hang out and nap under his shelter. we spent the next few days doing as little as possible, most of the time either napping or in the water. the water was like a warm bathtub, but it was still refreshing and nice. thursday night, we (mostly just stephan, brian, and i) drank an entire bottle of sweet port wine (an after-dinner drink not meant to be consumed in such quantities), followed by a bottle of red wine, went swimming, saw some amazing fluorescent plankton, and were bitten excessively by little water creatures. friday, we were going to visit a mountain called jabal buraa, a wildlife preserve with baboons, waterfalls, and i'm not sure what else, but we found out that it was a few hours from salif and we were all quite exhausted from the trip the day before and just wanted to enjoy the beach/not sweating. i woke up, went for a little swim, and made my way over to the hut guy's shelter. stephan was already napping, maybe around 9:30 am. even amina (who is a ball of energy) napped for a bit, and i believe brian (who never sleeps) napped a total of perhaps 5-6 hours, a few of those with his right leg and the right side of his face in the sun. very good day. we ate lunch with the hut guy, fresh fish, rice, and vegetable sauce. that night was fairly uneventful, aside from amina randomly going for swims followed by intense sprints on the beach, while the rest of us lounged on the beach. we returned on saturday, a holiday (unification day!), and made the genius decision to negotiate with the driver who picked us up at salif port to take us back to hodeidah. he picked us up in a big, air-conditioned van and we convinced him to drive us back to sanaa for about $10 each (with his lunch and qat thrown in)...not much more than we would have paid for the trip back to hodeidah with him and then the sweaty, crowded, stinky peugeot. we ate at the hodeidah fish market again (picked out our fish, crabs, and shrimp this time...the first time we had arrived too late), bought some decent qat, and made our leisurely way back to sanaa. we stopped to try some camel milk from a camel-herder along the way (for some reason we bought 3-4 bottles), which was quite good but of course warm because it was straight from the camel. watched them squeeze it into the bottle...delish.

this past weekend, we stayed here to relax and chill out. it did not turn out so chill, with a little too much russian club, drinking, and qat, but it was nice to stay in sanaa. on friday, i went to the sheraton for the first time, had a few beers, swam in the pool, and relaxed in the sun...ala hisaab the UN.

well i am at work and have just wasted an hour blogging (from amideast's perspective), so i will write about my thoughts on the future next time.

love,
addie

!!!!!!

YAY!!!!! my bb became famous on his 24th birthday AND (inshallah) the bill banning child marriage in Yemen will soon be passed!!!

some other articles by Oliver:
studying in Yemen after Abdulmutallab
almost-delicious (cheaper than faHsa) salta
nonprofit dar assalam fights extremism in schools

and some really FUCKED UP SHIT:
runaway child bride

and now that i have pointed you toward some informative articles and enlightened you on various goings-on in Yemen, i can feel comfortable blabbing about my personal life for the remainder of this post. first of all, i have yet to post about my new PUPPY! perhaps not so new anymore. i got her about 2 months ago from one of my students at AMIDEAST who will be participating in the YES exchange program and spending the 2010-2011 academic year studying in a US high school. he heard that i wanted a puppy, and offered to bring her by to my house. when i asked if he would be able to take her back if things didn't work out, or watch her when i traveled, he replied in the most nonchalant tone humanly possible "yeah, whatever you want, you just tell me." no pressure. but of course, when you adopt a tiny, little, adorable puppy who attaches herself to you in the course of a few hours and trusts you so much that she sleeps on her back with legs splayed, there is LOTS of pressure.

aaaand now i will edit this draft of a post, which i began over a month ago...oops. puppy is doing well, although still not potty-trained (probably my fault). she has grown from a tiny little near-hairless rat into a still very small shaggy old man in the past few months. still adorable and aggravating simultaneously...and now i think she has fleas. either that or i have bed bugs in my new house. YES i have moved into a new HOUSE! i have fulfilled my dream of living in the old city. i was getting a bit tired of tahrir square and all the traffic...and my $250/month rent started to seem really expensive after my trip to socotra (did i post about this...probably not...will do, or perhaps fb pics suffice). i am now living in a house with 4 foreigners, 1 chinese/american girl (soo-rae) who found the place and has taken all the responsibilities for it on her shoulders (AMAZING), 2 american guys (chris and justin) and 1 kickboxing frenchman (guillaume). we each have a bedroom, which has prevented us from having a mufraj (there are only 5 rooms that are not dungeons), but we also have 2 balconies and one has become mufraj-ish. the house is BEAUTIFUL, freshly painted and fixed up, and so far mostly problem-free (except for some water issues, unavoidable in the yem). AAAND only $100/month. be jealous. i do deserve this house though, after waiting 3 months for a supposedly phenomenally wonderful apartment that i could never move into. gave the landlord my deposit, then he proceeded to delay my move-in date by 2 months (the former resident wasn't moving out), and then 1 more month for repairs. i never even saw the house, and eventually got fed up and decided even the most glorious shiqa in the world was not worth having this landlord. still working on getting the remaining half of my deposit back, a couple weeks after that. but, i guess my house of foreigners was meant to be. glad to be living with people again...my old apartment was really too big for one person (even with a small dog and often a devastatingly handwome brit) and got a bit lonely at times. so, all in all, very happy with my living situation!

work...not so much. it's been insanely busy lately, and i have felt quite overwhelmed and NOT like an intern. i definitely think it's better than the opposite, being a useless intern who spell-checks and enters data into spreadsheets, but that doesn't really take away from the stress. it is still very rewarding though, and i love all the students participating in the programs i work with. edward is an excellent and ridiculously organized boss, so whenever i get overwhelmed or get a call from a parent telling me that their child is depressed because they cannot continue with a program (NOT MY DECISION!), i just go see him and he lays it out so that it all makes sense and i don't feel like a horrible person. not that i really feel like a horrible person, i just feel horrible for students sometimes. i suppose such is life. only 3 more months at AMIDEAST, and then i'll be escorting a group of YES high school exchange students to DC. we'll depart on august 4th (me, 23 yemeni kids, hopefully my pup), spend endless hours in transit, even more endless hours in immigration, and thennnn i'll be back in the US of A! really not sure at all what my plan is after that. so far i've come up with teaching english somewhere or trying to find another position in international education, but i am never sure about any one thing for more than a few days. any suggestions??

off to get some food, will tryyyyy to post more. OH also, oliver has a NEW BLOG which should of course be checked out (although i'm sure i will post his articles too from time to time).

xo

AAAHHH!!

yuck