In Morocco!

A few months ago, I learned that a conference publication of mine had been accepted to LREC, the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference in my research field of natural language processing. Good news after months of hard work. And the even better news is... the conference would be held in Marrakesh, Morocco!


مراكش



So, here I am, Day 1 of a 10 day adventure in Northern Africa. While the conference itself is only three full days (Wed-Friday of this week), I have arrived mid-morning Monday, have all of Tuesday to explore, and then have Saturday through next Tuesday to leave Marrakesh and see what else Morocco has in store. Because I attended a wedding outside New York City this Saturday, it was convenient to fly from JFK to Marrakesh (through Casablanca) on Sunday. Convenient, but a lot of traveling, and less conveniently, my luggage didn't make it all the way there with me. The airline claims that they'll deliver the luggage to my hotel when it arrives, but we'll see....
(postscript: they definitely didn't. I had to make my way back to the airport and pick it up myself later; fortunately I was carrying around my passport or I couldn't have gotten into the baggage claim, which I hadn't thought of before)

I really wish I had brushed up on my two semesters of Arabic before I came. Despite the fact that I learned the formal dialect and parts of the Syrian dialect (far different from the North African dialects), it definitely could have come in handy. Instead, I'm left with a 1st grade reading level and a vocabulary which roughly allows me to exchange niceties and shoo away the shopkeepers but not much else. Definitely something to brush up on, but I'll have to do it by massaging my memory or asking around, since Arabic-English dictionaries at my level (vowels included) don't really exist, and definitely aren't sold in these parts in any case.

All in all though, I immediately loved the chaos and the newness of it all. I'm exhausted from the flights, but can't wait to explore. :-)