About a month after finishing my year in Ifrane, I returned to Morocco for a Critical Languages Scholarship in Tangier. Dear readers, it is such an experience: I’m living with an impossibly wonderful host family and roommate now, and speaking Arabic all the time. I’m also taking part in an almost brutally intensive language program. Free time is therefore spent studying, talking to the family and, because of the recent Ramadan holiday (Eid Mubarak, dear readers!), eating.

So much.

You guys, it’s become a bit of a war. The other week, after almost making my stomach explode with watermelon and other things he convinced me to eat too much of, my host father threw a bonbon bomb at me. One computer casualty, the result of a fall from my lap, but, Alhamdulillah, no fatalities.

Around that time, my host mother decided to make shebbakiah, a fried dough cookie dipped in honey and covered in sesame seeds. Here are some visuals (mostly taken by my host father, who is a photojournalist), as well as a recipe:

And, to prove to Tim and my parents that, yes, I was there, here’s me pretending to work:

Eid Mubarak!