On the Road with Julie

Among so many things, this trip to Morocco has turned out to be a slice of language heaven and exactly the perfect trip to be taking at this particular time in my journey around the world. With 6 weeks of intensive language study behind me in both French and Spanish, I got a chance to take my newly exercise skills out for a test-drive and just enjoy the feeling of the open road. 

Before anything else, I got to have my first experience of pulling a dormant language back into the forefront, since French is one of the official languages of Morocco. Right from the moment I arrived, I got to navigate logistics with my slightly sleepy french. 

But, once we were waist dip in our Morocco adventures, I got way more than I’d hoped for when I first planned this stop. When planning my language trip around the world, I chose to put our little Moroccan adventure into the seventh week of my travels for largely logistical reasons. I would be in Granada, Spain the two weeks prior, a quick flight across the Strait of Gibraltar to get there. Plus, it was going to be Valentine’s Day and Ryan’s birthday two days later. And my man loves desert landscapes. It just all made perfect sense. Once we got on our 3 day tour towards the Sahara, and did so in a sea of international travelers, t was clear that this was the perfect linguistic layover as I hopped from one language lily-pad to another. After 6 weeks working on my Spanish and French, two languages that I came into this trip with a decent handle over (and PLENTY of room for some much-needed improvement), as we traveled on our 3 day tour from Marrakech to the Sahara, I found myself in my dream language scenario, like having arrived at the top of a mountain I didn’t previously realize I had been climbing. Now, I was out of school, and in the wilds of the world in a mix of nationalities, getting a chance to take my newly honed skills out for a test drive. And I found myself getting to live, in real time, the linguistic dream that I had always had – having the ability to build a bridge of words that allowed me to get to know people and share good times where there would otherwise have been a barrier, wow – it was everything I had always hoped when I first set out to pursue language learning!

As we sat at the restaurant, ready to order after a full day of incredible tours through the UNESCO world heritage site of Ait Ben Haddou, my waiter asked me, in English, what I’d like to order. He asked me in English, so I responded in English. I started with my typical, “I have allergies.” He asked me what they were. I started with, “peanuts”. He immediately turned to walk away walking towards the kitchen. I knew that look on his face – it was a look of linguistic barrier searching for a solution. “Cacahuetes!” I called after him, in French. My words were like a linguistic lasso pulling him back to our table. 

The sense of having had the tool in my toolbelt to tighten the leak in that moment, was, for me, worth all of the effort and all of the hours and all of the frustration that can come with invested language study.  We continued the rest of the ordering process in French. 

Ryan and I were both very excited for this trip to Morocco, for many reasons. It would be both of our first times visiting Morocco and our first time on the continent of Africa. But, it’s also, somewhat unexpectedly, turned out so far to be the perfect place to be at this exact time in my language learning trip around the world as it is giving me a chance, outside of the classroom, to experience the triumph of exactly why I’ve always loved learning languages to begin with.

As lunch continued, we sat at a table with 2 couples. In one couple, there was a North Carolinian who, of course, speaks English with that familiar and comforting American accent. But, he was also a second generation Colombian and speaks Spanish fluently. He was there with his Slovenian girlfriend who is currently studying in Amsterdam and speaks perfect English with a gentle and beautiful accent that is a mix of Baltic and German. She speaks (at least) Slovenian, German and seems to understand some Spanish. The other couple is a Peruvian woman that speaks Spanish and Italian, but no English, with her Italian man that speaks Italian and some English. He doesn’t speak Spanish, but understands Spanish. And then, there was Ryan, who speaks English and a little bit of French. And so the language hopscotch began. The conversation began hopping in English across the table between Ryan and I and our North Carolinian Columbian friend and our Slovenian friend. And, as soon as I realized that our Peruvian friend didn’t speak English, I started speaking with her and our Italian friend in Spanish. And, when the English conversation continued and I could tell that our Italian friend’s english wasn’t quite enough to keep up, I’d hop over and start translating into Spanish. I was hopping back and forth from english to spanish and an occasional french with our waiter.

I was in language heaven.

And this is nothing to speak of the conversation itself, which was characteristic of the kind we would continue to find with our international band of travelmates over this three day excursion. There was a special kind of shared insight and reflection on the events of the world and each of our respective countries that we found ourselves in.

And, that evening, the joy continued. This time, we were at a table with a French couple and an Italian couple. The French couple, at first, seemed reluctant to join the conversation, despite a decent enough grasp in English, that is until I started the conversation with familiar sounds. One of the highlights of my trip is the look on their faces when I said, “Comment ca va?”. Another barrier melted! Before long I was hopping back and forth between English and French and feeling the thrill of flexing my newly exercised muscles and getting to be at this table with new friends from far and wide. I don’t have words to describe the feeling as each of us started tackling the state of the world we all find ourselves in – each educating the other on the world from our respective countries. We found ourselves discussing and reflecting on the rise of populism in each of our homes – what is happening, why it is happening, how we feel about it and our hopes and dreams for the future of the world that we are all in together. 

This was exactly what I needed after 6 weeks of French and Spanish study. It was a reward for all of my hard work and an incredible burst of fuel for the studies and adventures to come.

I can’t say, in our miniature international convening, that we solved any of the world’s problems – but we may have buoyed each other up with enough insight and hope to plant a few seeds of something good along the way. 

For me, this time in Morocco was so many good things. But a chance to experience a touch of language heaven, was definitely one of them.