I'm sorry I left some of you with the impression that I was ETing (or had already). I was angry about a few things, to be sure, but not enough to quit Peace Corps. My blog absence over the past couple weeks has been for a much happier reason: I've been on vacation!
Some friends and I wandered around Europe for the holidays. I'll be posting pictures and stories for quite a while to come, I suspect.
But now, I'm back in my village, drinking lots of tea and chatting in Tamazight for the first time in a while. My Tam is rusty - not surprisingly - but it has come back readily, to my delight. In SouqTown, which I had to pass through on my way home from the airport, I chatted about my vacation to several friends (ie my favorite veggie saleslady and my favorite sandwich guy), answered their questions, and successfully ran all my SouqTown errands.
At the sandwich shop, after the round of greetings and oh-where-have-you-beens:
Sandwich Dude: So, what would you like?
Me: I'll have a sandwich of makoda [[potato latke-like things]] and eggs. Wait, do you have makoda today?
SD: Over here [pointing to the other side of his display case]. Two eggs?
Me: Yup, two eggs and two makodas.
SD's assistant: Soup?
Me: [frozen]
He'd offered me harira, which sounds a lot like hrra, which is hot sauce. And for a second, I couldn't remember whether harira was soup or hot sauce. Because soup sounded like a fabulous idea, but I'm not a big fan of heavily spiced food.
SD's assistant: La soupe [in French]
SD: [laughing] She knows what "soup" is.
Me: [laughing, to SD, indicating SD's assistant with my head] He thinks I don't know anything. Hahaha...
So, still a few bumps in the road.
Like "donut". Morocco has great donuts, usually only available on souq days. I was thinking about those Moroccan donuts as I rode home from the airport, and realized that I couldn't remember the word for them. Sss...sh... I was pretty sure it started with a sh... I visualized the donuts, sh'd inside my head...nothing. It was gone.
And then when we pulled through a town having their souq (which lines the main road, as well as extending into a big open space), I saw a guy carrying a string of sfinj and the word was just *there*.
So, yeah, I'm still knocking the rust off my Tamazight vocab, but it's comforting to know that I haven't actually forgotten it, despite not using it for the better part of a month. The words are there when I need them. :)
Welcome back to Berberville, Kauthar!
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