Okay.

Today is my twelfth day in Rabat, Morocco and I really cannot over-emphasize how astounding this place is.  To start from the beginning, my flight into the African continent (from Paris to Rabat) was awe-inspiring in itself;  it traced the coast of Spain to the tip of North Africa and all the way along the coast to the capital city. I could see all the varied terrain–mountains, plains, beaches–and even the actual contour of the country’s edge like the curvature of a spine.

My first four nights in Rabat were spent at the Hotel Majestic (Majestic might have been a bit of an overstatement, but each room did at least have a shower complete with hot water), which is located directly across the street from the medina (Rabat’s old city). The medina is a labyrinth. When I received the address for my homestay family (note: all of SIT’s homestays are located inside the medina), I thought I’d try to get at least a rough sense of my new home’s location by looking the medina up in an online map. Oops! As it turns out, the Rabat medina is the first town I have ever encountered that is completely undocumented on Google Maps. It is composed of intricately curved, stone-paved streets and thus, although it is thickly populated and bursts with street vendors offering djellabas, hookahs, slippers and snails, it registers only as an obscure grey void on the screen. My homestay family and their home really deserves its own blog entry, so until I catch up to that I’ll mention SIT’s main academic building here, which is a real work of art:

In the annex, there are several stained glass windows and all of the doors, door frames, windows, etc. are carved and painted and the walls and floors are lined with detailed tile patterns, like those above. I personally think that standing inside the building is somewhat like living inside a giant kaleidoscope, if you can imagine that, with a variety of patterns and elements that meld together and almost seem to diffract and re-form depending on where one is standing at the time.

Now, the terrace. Oh, the terrace. It has a 360 degree panoramic view of both the city and the ocean and I plan to study there every chance I get. Here is a taste of the view:

That’s all for now. Enjoy the pictures if you can (although I’m certainly not the most natural photographer) and look forward to stories about a Moroccan family in the entries to come!

–Alex