Last Thursday, my roommate Zoe and I met up at a Thai place nearby in Agdal that she had tried with some of our classmates the night before. I enjoyed talking over my first real non-home-cooked dinner since coming to Morocco (even if it was Thai and not Moroccan cuisine!) with my
new roommate and getting to know more about her. Pursuing a PhD at the moment, she is incredibly smart for her young age and I think I am on the right track to following a similar path of wisdom and success as long as I keep things up! It was very enjoyable getting to people-watch with her and sit back and relax after an exhausting day (We had originally intended to go shopping in Agdal after school got out but I had finally gotten my checked luggage from the airport…why it spent three nights in Atlanta when no city south of Philadelphia was on my itinerary, I have no idea!! That aside, I was just happy to at last feel at ease because I didn’t have to bother wondering about what I was going to wear the next morning and worry about if I would ever see my stuff again.). Just as we were finishing up dinner, my classmate from Australia Maggie called to see about meeting up to go to a concert that evening so after picking up some groceries from the local market with Zoe, we headed back to our apartment and I got ready for the concert.
As a way to boost tourism and promote the culture (or so it is claimed), His Majesty the King of Mohammed VI sponsors a free annual music festival at the end of May called the Mawazine (“Rhythms”). I head read about this event even before having arrived to Rabat and I was really hoping to listen to Nancy Ajram sing because of all the performers I looked into, she was really the only Arab singer that I was familiar with and really enjoy her music. However, because she was performing the same day that I flew in, I hadn’t yet met my roommates nor classmates so I had no one to accompany me to the concert and I didn’t dare go alone (plus, I got a pretty sweet tour of the city and made a really great friend of the neighbors by not going out that night). So even though I unfortunately missed Nancy, whose style I consider the epitome of modern Arab pop music, Maggie was interested just as I was in attending any concert at all before the event was over. Some of our classmates had gone to one venue a few nights before and did not enjoy the extent of harassment they experienced so Maggie and I were on our own, but we took our chances and actually had a very good time. We didn’t make it early enough to see the female Egyptian singer Angham, but we did see Melhem Zein from Lebanon and he was outstanding!
As a way to boost tourism and promote the culture (or so it is claimed), His Majesty the King of Mohammed VI sponsors a free annual music festival at the end of May called the Mawazine (“Rhythms”). I head read about this event even before having arrived to Rabat and I was really hoping to listen to Nancy Ajram sing because of all the performers I looked into, she was really the only Arab singer that I was familiar with and really enjoy her music. However, because she was performing the same day that I flew in, I hadn’t yet met my roommates nor classmates so I had no one to accompany me to the concert and I didn’t dare go alone (plus, I got a pretty sweet tour of the city and made a really great friend of the neighbors by not going out that night). So even though I unfortunately missed Nancy, whose style I consider the epitome of modern Arab pop music, Maggie was interested just as I was in attending any concert at all before the event was over. Some of our classmates had gone to one venue a few nights before and did not enjoy the extent of harassment they experienced so Maggie and I were on our own, but we took our chances and actually had a very good time. We didn’t make it early enough to see the female Egyptian singer Angham, but we did see Melhem Zein from Lebanon and he was outstanding!
To view the entire concert we saw, click here!
