The first thing I noticed walking into the botanical garden today was the overpowering smell of plants. There are long beds of sage, rosemary, and cumin throughout the garden, and the sage is blooming, as is almost everything else in the garden. There is pollen in the air so thick I keep sneezing, and the […]

It’s starting to get hot in the afternoons. There is wisteria blooming all over Rabat, especially along the trellises in the botanical garden, and the cat that lives at the language center had her kittens. Spring is here in full swing. I even saw a turtle walking down the path on my way into the […]

The Bouregreg river splits the cities of Rabat and Salé. It is not huge, but is certainly substantial. From the Chellah, a Middle Ages necropolis and mosque built on top of a Roman city, you can look out over the river and the bit of marshy land separating it from the city, where right now […]

It rained this morning, and on and off last night. At breakfast my host mom warned me about the cold, but the rain felt warm and light from a Midwestern perspective. By now, around lunch time, the garden is dry except for a couple puddles in the gutters in the shade and a bit of […]

I am sitting in my university’s garden, a patch of grass and bushes between a few blocky buildings. I just got out of Modern Standard Arabic, and my brain is fried – it is the end of my first week of classes in Morocco, and the end of my first week speaking only Arabic, all […]