Waiting for Ramadan

We've been waiting for several weeks now for Ramadan to get here, and it's so close that we can almost taste it. Over the last few days I've noticed several telltale signs of the month of Ramadan--the bakeries have huge platters of sweets, lights are strung from houses, flags adorn the parks...and the Moroccan King reset the clock (thanks for the extra hour of sleep)! I wouldn't have known about the time change had it not been posted by one of my friends on Facebook. Google was also aware of the time change. I see how it is...Now we're just waiting for the official announcement of when Ramadan actually starts.

This weekend we made another trip to the beach, which is where these pictures are from. This was our first free weekend this summer, which was really nice to be able to relax a little bit. Besides having 7 people squeezed into a car for an hour, the entire trip was great.

As we were leaving, we stopped by a bookstore just to see what they had. I ended up buying 4 small books about the Wright brothers, space & artificial satellites, and Galileo. As I was about to pay for my books, I was explaining to the owner that I focus on astronautical engineering in my university and that I was really excited to buy books in Arabic on this topic. He then began to enlighten me on how, in reality, it is not the Earth that revolves around the sun, but actually the sun revolves around the earth. I didn't want to get into an argument, though, and plus I haven't taken AAE 532--Orbit Mechanics, so I probably wouldn't know anyway...

Low tide at Asilah.

Artist's depiction of immigration (remember the video I posted awhile ago?).

Our group.

There's really not much to report here, just a lot of studying. Last week the subject was Arabic literature, and this week we're discussing economics. It's hard to believe that I'll be headed back to the US in 2.5 weeks and will be starting school shortly after that. The summer has really gone by quickly!

Have a good Sunday!