Today was one of those days where you sit down at the end of it and realize you took in a lot more than you expected to. We spent time doing deep dives into Moroccan religion, politics, and the role of women, and all three of them gave me a lot to think about. On the women side, something that has been quietly surprising me since I got here is how different the reality is compared to the research we did before the trip. I expected a much more conservative dress code across the board, but the women here are not dressing the way I anticipated at all. I even talked to my host sister about it and she was completely unbothered, telling me that short shorts are totally fine too. And then there is the reality of the women in my host family, all of them are housewives, which is its own thing to sit with as a woman myself. It is not a bad thing, it is just different from what I am used to seeing, and it made me think about how the role of women here exists on this really wide spectrum that does not fit neatly into one image. On the politics side, we learned about Morocco’s constitution and government structure and one thing that genuinely caught me off guard was that none of us actually knew how many articles are in our own constitution either, which was a humbling moment for the whole group. What really stuck with me though was this contrast between Morocco and the US, Morocco has a hard time actually implementing the rights it signs onto, while the US tends to be the opposite, willing to implement things but often reluctant to sign onto international agreements around disability rights, sustainability, and things like that in the first place. Two very different problems but both worth thinking about.

Then we headed to the beach and honestly the universe decided to keep things interesting from the very start because Aanya got chased by a crying baby on the way there and I have not fully recovered from witnessing that. The beach itself was one of the most visually interesting moments of the trip so far, there were people in bikinis and people fully covered head to toe wading into the ocean at the same time, and something about seeing both exist in the same space without any tension was really striking to me. It felt like a quiet representation of everything I have been observing all week, Morocco just holds a lot of contrasts at once and does not seem to feel the need to resolve them. We did have one moment that was a lot less fun though, an older man kept circling our group and staring for well over ten minutes and would not stop even after we were giving him every dirty look in our arsenal. It was unsettling and we were very ready to leave after that. But the day redeemed itself fully when Aanya came over to my host family’s place for tea time and we sat down and split every single cookie on the plate between us, tried every single one, zero regrets. It was the kind of ending that a day this full one hundred percent deserved.