End of Ramadan

Once again i have waited far too long to update this. I think I recently wrote about Ramadan. Well, I fasted the entire month except for five days. :) I explained most of what happens in my town in my Ramadan post of last year. We broke fast at the second to last call to prayer, basically at sunset. Then most people went to bed at their normal time and woke up at 3:30am. There was a drummer who came by to wake everyone up. Most people had real dinners at this hour while I, on the other had, tended to have a snack like a smoothie or yogurt and fruit. I just couldn't do the full dinner at this hour.
I broke fast at someone's house almost every night of Ramadan. The photo below is actually from one of the houses that I went to. The break fast meal was usually bread heavy and very sweet. Everyone breaks fast with a date and then digs in :) At this particular fdr(breakfast) there was also hard boiled egss, shebekiya(honey covered sweet), a few kinds of moroccan bread, "berber pizza," cake and many other yummy things. The meal is always accompanied by sweet mint tea or coffee. After the bready meal, everyone gets a bowl of soup. The soup is called Harira and is usually tomato based and has chickpeas, pasta and sometimes veggies. The soup was usually my favorite part. Though, everyone has the same basic meal it was really interesting to see how each house had slight differences. I really enjoyed Ramadan despite the difficulty of fasting. Ramadan ended on the 20th of september so now we're back to normal eating schedules, hamdullah.

Ras Lma

I promised that I would write about my recent vacation to Ras Lma and look I'm keeping my promise. :) My sitemate, Briana, and I are actually just two days apart in age. Crazy huh? So we decided to celebrate our birthdays together by going to a quiet beach on the Mediterranean. We went a week after our birthday and had quite an adventure getting there. We were waiting to take a train from Fes to Nador and instead of getting on the next train we were at the train station for hours because a previous train on that route had derailed. We couldn't leave until they cleared the mess up. Once we did leave we thought all was well but only discoverd a few hours later that we had to change trains (trainge) because the derailed train was still on the tracks. We walked past the derailed train and hopped on a new overcrowded and hot train. After hours of heat, tiredness, hunger and everything else we finally made it to Nador. Once there we took a grand taxi to Ras Lma. None of us had been before and were rather pleasantly surprised by our accomadations and the town in general.

Ras Lma is actually a little berber town nestled between the mountains and the sea. The town doesn't have hotels so we rented an apartment. The only people vacationing there were Moroccans. Really I think I only saw two other foreigners. The water was warm and it felt great to just relax and take in the scenery about me. I also learned a bit about the differences between the berber dialect spoken there as compared to the one that I have been learning :)

Cliffs below the lighthouse. Its beautiful here and these cliffs are perfect for a nice (and sorta scary) jump into the sea. I actually jumped, as you can see below. I did it after a couple of failed attempts haha. And no, I still don't know how to swim, but my friend was below in the water ready to grab me once I went under. It was actually a lot of fun :)