My flight to Morocco is in a few hours and so many conflicting feelings are running through my mind. Of course, I am excited. I can’t wait to go to Morocco after all this preparation. I knew over a year ago that I wanted to travel to Morocco for my humanities capstone, but there was always a doubt in my mind that I would actually get there. I am looking forward to exploring Rabat and other cities in Morocco. There are so many new things and different things to anticipate. Warm weather. Mint tea. Beautiful cities. The busy medinas. It will be a very different environment to what I am used to.But there is also a lot of negative and anxious thoughts. Am I prepared? Is it worth it? Will I actually learn things? Will it be as exciting an experience as I have been hoping it will? What if I don’t adjust well? A lot of these thoughts are similar to when I was going to college for the first time. I did not think I was prepared at all to go to college and live away from home. And while this was something I had been preparing towards for years, the combined pressures of education and responsibility were a lot to adjust to. I struggled a lot to manage everything and it took most of the first year for me to really have a good time at school. It’s a little worrying of what the adjustment period will be like doing the same thing, but in a country 4000 miles away and no way to get home and escape.
I know that it will definitely be a learning experience. As much as I have prepared with Arabic courses and preparation courses, being in Morocco will be a wildly different experience. I know that studying in Morocco will be worth all of the worries and anxieties leading up to it. By the end of the term, I am hoping to have a deeper understanding of Morocco and Moroccan culture. I want to be able to hold a short conversation in Darija, even if I am nowhere near fluent. I want to try some delicious new food, and I want to become skilled at bargaining in the Medina! Overall, I hope that by the end of this trip I feel like I took complete advantage of all the opportunities offered to me and that I had a great time!