First day w/ host family

Whoa. So much has happened in the last two days that I don't even know where to begin. Mostly just yesterday, actually. I'll start with now.

I am writing this from my host family's living room. Maybe "all purpose" room would be more accurate. They live at the edge of the medina, not too far from the touristy areas (but not too close, either) This is where I slept yesterday, but I will get my own room on Wednesday. At the school, they said that you would only have to share a host family if you agreed to it. They failed to mention that if you don't share, you may not get one. Yesterday, I wondered about a thousand times if sharing would have been a better idea, as long as the other person spoke more Arabic than me, but I'll make this work.

The guy at the school asked me what I was expecting from a host family. I told him I could deal with any location, food or bathroom style (three things he asked about) as long as I was with a family that would be willing to talk to me and help me with my Arabic. Then he said about sharing, I said I really wanted to be on my own, he found a solution. There's a group from a university here that is leaving on the second (which I just realized is actually THURSday) so he put me with a girl from there instead. She's got the guest bedroom right now, so I am in the main room until she leaves.

So............... be careful what you wish for. The mom came to pick me up, said hi, and one of the guys from the school accompanied us to explain a few things to me on the way and spoke to me in English and her in Arabic. The first guy at the school said I should stay in a place where they would speak MSA ('Standard' variety used on news and stuff, but spoken by VERY few) and I wasn't excited about that, but he was insistent since that's what I'll be learning at school. It won't be a problem because they don't speak the standard variety here. They speak Darija (Moroccan Arabic.) Period. No French, no English. Oy. Talk about headaches. Try explaining that you need to go get your suitcase from the American girl you stayed with last night, and you need to call her but don't have a phone. We did eventually get it figured out and I had my stuff at about 10:30. But there were hours of gesturing, talking slowly, me trying to ask questions (that were clearly NOT understood) and general confusion. I don't think they were terribly impressed, but what can you do?

The daughter is in high school, so she does speak some English, but not a lot. She has helped me some by giving me phrases and words as I ask them. Some of these are just "how do you say 'how do you say'?" The little things that are so helpful. But even then it only gets you so far! Then you need words like what, where, when, why, but those barely do anything when you don't understand the answer. At all. I find that one of my most helpful classes has been field methods - getting information on a language from a native speaker informant. We had to read a few things with suggestions on how to do that, and a lot of them were kind of obvious after you read them, but I actually am thinking about it now that I am stuck with no choice but to try to gesture and guess my way through conversations. And that word can only be taken in the loosest terms since we can't get much across.

I'll be taking classes starting Monday for 4 hours a day. My first 'shift' is 10-12AM, then 4-6pm. I wasn't real excited about the later time, but the girl I wandered around with all yesterday (til 4ish) has 8-10 and 2-4. I can't decide which is better. Then I found out that Karen has classes 8-10 and 4-6. Ok, she wins for worst schedule. She can't even get a nice nap in the middle for most of the time, though, because she's got 2 hours of tutoring because she's on a grant that requires 200 hours of class. And she's staying only 6 weeks. Yeah, that sounds a little crazy to me. No, thank you! K, I'm not sure what's going on exactly today, but I shall go try to figure that out.