Another Wedding

On Wednesday night, Krista's former host sister invited us to a wedding in some place called Bouarfa. Realizing that we were unlikely to accomplish anything work-related with the rest of the week, we opted to go along with her. She told us it would be one night and about 3 hours away.  On Thursday, halfway there, she informed us we were actually going for two nights and it's a good 6 hours away.

This image was stolen from the internet.  My city is in the North East, we travel Oujda and straight south to Bouarfa, near Figuig, passing Ain Beni Mathar and Tendrara on the way.  Both towns can be passed through in less than 2 minutes- this area of the country is mostly empty.

After crashing out on a sheepskin at maybe 10 pm on Thursday, we woke up to some fairly impressive heat.  44 degrees celsius, that is, or 111 degrees fahrenheit.  My lack of clothing, serious sweating capabilities, and severe digestive discomfort helped set the stage for another all-night Moroccan dance-party, the second in a week.  But surprisingly, it wasn't all that bad- was even fun for a bit, and the apogee of the evening occurred at the dinner table rather than in the bathroom.  I was explaining what I'm doing here (which is still somewhat unclear) to a table of friendly-looking guys when one asked me what I thought about Bush.  I said I wasn't a huge fan, and he said:

"yes, he is very racist"
"well, I think he maybe didn't know what he was doing"
"yes, the Jews"
"what?"
"The US congress is full of Jews, I know"
"Well, that's not really the truth, nor objective"
"you're not jewish right? you're a real american?"
"no, I'm not Jewish. I can't talk about politics in my organization"

That's nice- real consistency, very self-aware.  Luckily this kind of conversation is fairly rare, but never particularly fun to engage in.

Anyway, the groom showed up around midnight or so, and the party started at 1, ended at 5, when the entire wedding party piled into vans/cars (there were 11 people in ours), and drove four hours north, through the sunrise, to Oujda where the party continued.  Very strange.

Anyway, tomorrow to Hoceima for our regional meeting where we'll learn a bit more about what we're doing.

On another note- I've posted to the right a survey about what I should get for the apartment, as well as a list of books.  Judging by the number of responses, I've enjoyed 4 visitors in the last few days, which is strange because the internets are telling me this blog was visited on 18 separate occasions in the last 2 days from Ukraine.