I am a mere twelve hours from my one-week anniversary of being here, in Meknes.

So far, I have friends (five or six of them!), an apartment full of wonderful useful things (a beautiful Berber carpet, a cafetera for making coffee, dishes, an ashtray, food!), I have selected the level of course that I will be teaching (beginners!) and I have learned to navigate my city.

I arrived with the thought that I would immediately travel, but Meknes has proved to be more exciting and busy than I expected.  I have found a favorite cafe, a pair of wonderful carpet dealers with whom to have tea on visits to the medina, and plenty of little shops that remind me of the bodegas one might encounter in Brooklyn or Queens.

There is an Ikea-type store called Kitea (hmm...), a modern grocery called Label' Vie, a huge department store called Marjane that even a seasoned WalMart shopper like myself could get lost inside.  There are numerous cafes which from the outside appear to be the domain of men, as tradition would dictate, however, inside is often another story.  Women dress more liberally than I'd ever have expected, and I've already seen several with more ostentatious nose rings than my own. 

Of course, there are also men who stare when I'm daring enough to smoke in public, men who follow me from my neighborhood all the way to the medina, and women who scoff at my nowhere-near-tight jeans.  There are completely veiled women to complement each in a midriff-baring top.

At the pool the other day, I wore my modest tankini, with relatively full bottoms and a top which only shows a dash of cleavage.  The Moroccan girls wore skimpy bikinis tied on the sides and shook their asses.  At a cafe with a teacher friend yesterday, he asked why I always wear button-down shirts over my tank tops.  I told him I'd rather not get that much attention, and he said it was silly, I cover myself more than most Moroccan women do.

Sometimes, it appears I'm the conservative one.