African Insight

Last weekend, I stepped onto the continent of AFRICA! Woohoo!!! Thanks to Discovery Excursions (and biggest thanks to my PARENTS), I visited Chefchaouen, Tanger, and Asilah, Morocco in just two days. 

 Highlights: the mint tea, the blue doors and walls of the city, and I rode a camel!
                                    
Medium lights: got my first henna, the food overall was great (the salads hit the SPOT, the couscous, chicken was always cooked perfectly, and they served desserts for breakfast), and I met some pretty cool people.

Low lights: the WiFi wasn't cooperative, but that wasn't a big deal. I just wanted to complete the tri-lights.

One particular cultural difference worth noting/discussing is that Moroccans always speak more than one language, and speaking five languages is not uncommon. Is that not crazy?! Our tour guides too, of course, knew at least two languages, sometimes three. There were also some girls on our trip from Germany who knew English very well and are also currently learning Spanish. And last but not least, my program director for my experience in Spain is fluent in three languages and so are her children. Isn't that cool?! I think languages are awesome, and more than that, they are IMPORTANT. I was having a conversation with a group of high school friends not too long ago. We were discussing the changes in school curricula and the educational system (which is always an intriguing topic), and someone mentioned that the only thing that they still use from high school is foreign language. You can learn so much about your own native language through learning foreign languages. You can apply it to all kinds of topics and use cognates to remember terms that you remember for the rest of your life. Those are just common everyday uses. Being able to communicate with someone from an entirely different country is SO COOL. Something else that I find interesting is that if you fail to practice a language, you forget it! I know people who forgot their first language or cannot speak a language that they learned in school for 7 years simply because they never practiced it. Meeting so many people who know so many languages has really inspired me to learn more-- but not just learn them, KNOW them. I want to practice them. I want to remember them. I want to use them in all kinds of areas in my life. I know it is much easier to say that but not do it, but learning languages is something that my excursion to Morocco taught me and something that I hope I apply to my life.