First Day of School
After a whole month of everyone else in Canada being back at university, and now starting midterms, I finally started school today. And what a day it was! Hajo, Caleb and I woke up early and left the house for what we assumed would be a 30 minute commute to the school. Oh boy were we wrong! The tram took closer to 50 minutes, and we showed up super late on our first day- really making a good impression.
The day started with breakfast, which almost everyone had finished already, but before we could finish, we were sent off to write an Arabic placement test. Now as three guys who speak a combined total of ten arabic words, taking a test entirely in arabic was horrendous. We all basically looked at the test then turned it in with just our names on it. We were then (thankfully) allowed to finish our breakfasts.
Afterwards, we were told we had to take an arabic oral test, which like the last test, we all promptly failed and were put in the most basic Arabic classes. Following that, we had some down time to meet the other exchange students. As far as I know, there are four of us who are on a full year exchange; two of us from Canada, one from Taiwan, and one from Germany. I opted to take French in the second term, so I didn’t have to write the French placement test (thank God). The German guy, named Marian, isn’t taking French because he’s fluent so he and I had some time to kill.
We decided to go tour the school, which is only one building. Since we had so much time, we thought we’d go sit in on a class. Now in North America, we are used to classes being an hour or an hour and a half tops without a break, but we ended up in a three hour french lecture on constitutional law which was brutally long. However the class ended up with some positives; I realized I can actually understand enough french to get the gist of the lecture, the prof let us out after two hours, and there was a spirited debate about the role of the king in Morocco versus in other constitutional monarchies.
Afterwards, we met up with Hajo and had a very moroccan lunch of pizza. We then waited (read: napped) while Hajo opened a bank account, then ended the day with a basic arabic lesson from our friend Uncle Saad over tea.
All in all, it was an excellent first day of school. But any first in Morocco would not be complete without a commemorative selfie, so here is one of me outside the school!
