Just finished the second course of Arabic in Fes...it's a good feeling to be able to spend an evening actually NOT studying for once. A week of that and then it's back to the books for another six weeks. But I'm really used to the routine now and am confident that next the next term will be manageable. It will continue be pretty hard though, as the focus will be more on reading than grammar in the next two six-week terms. Lots of vocabulary...I have been learning twenty Arabic words (usually a pretty even mix of nouns and verbs) every three days, where as in the next term it will be more like twenty Arabic words per night. The hardest task will therefore be to retention of the vast vocabulary that I will be expected to master, while concurrently picking up more grammar points here and there. It will force me to work really hard, but on the flip side I should be able to improve my Arabic pretty fast as well...we'll see what happens. In two days I'll be camping over a mile above sea level among the verdant cedar-covered slopes of the Rif Mountains in far northern Morocco. I'll likely encounter some Barbary apes, some serene nights in remote Berber villages, and probably a lot of hash...I'll keep everyone posted with pics when I finally get around to putting them on a disc...