A very merry Christmas (so far)

This video says it all:

Claudia's Surprise from Patrick Braga-Henebry on Vimeo.

Being home this Christmas season has been the most wonderful gift. I schemed with big bro Patrick, my dad and best friend Alli to show up on Monday morning about five minutes before my Uncle Dave, Aunt Sue, cousin Brenna, and Grandma and her husband Tom walked in the door! They were stopping over on their way back to Texas from visiting Dave's family in Minnesota, and my Grandma's coming was a surprise earlier in the week for my family. I in turn surprised her as she walked in the door! I was so happy to come home in time to catch them and be able to visit for an afternoon and evening. Uncle Dave et al had come to the wedding in Morocco in August but I hadn't seen my Grandma since our American wedding well over a year ago and it was such a joy to sit down and visit. 

Courtesy of my mom's Facebook

Courtesy of my Aunt Sue's Facebook

Again from Aunt Sue's Facebook. Thanks Uncle Dave for taking it!

Even though I've only been home about 48 hours I've just been so filled with joy to be laughing with my sisters, playing games with my siblings, introducing soon-to-be-sister-in-law Emily to Braga-Henebry family staple movies like Singin' in the Rain and It's a Wonderful Life, baking, taking pictures, talktalktalking, and even making a mini gingerbread village! All this in only the past two days!

Again from mom's Facebook. Note all the beer-- definitely not in Morocco anymore!

There were four gingerbread houses-- perfect for my three sisters plus Emily, and my coming rather ruined that, but Emily and I joined forces on the biggest house of the four and are so happy with the results of our collaboration! It's called the "Christmas Cottage".

Next up is Bia's, entitled "Untitled", in her typical no-nonsense fashion.

Tessie's is named "The-one-that-looks-okay-as-long-as-you-don't-look-at-its-left-side" in her typical so-nonsense fashion!

Tessie gave a name to Isabel's, "Perfection", both describing how we see her gingerbread house and how we all see her in general!

Isn't our village just too cute??

Stay tuned for more pictures of the holiday season in the Braga-Henebry house! And a big thank you shout-out to hubby Othman for proposing this trip less than two weeks ago and helping me get a last minute ticket! What a wonderful Christmas gift from him. As my mom and Grandma exclaimed, he's on the good husband list.

Poor turtles!

Remember the cute little turtle family from Othman's birthday cake? 

They're made out of sugar and his mom kept them for us to take home. But we forgot them a couple times in a row... and when the other day she got them out for us to take... I didn't want them anymore:

Now that's one intense before and after!

Goodbye to J and J

Last Tuesday I had to say goodbye to to private students that I had the pleasure of teaching since October 2012! They've made appearances on this blog before, here and here, for their respective birthdays.

Julien is now 9 and Justine is now 12, and they've grown so much since I started going to their house and helping them keep up with their English two and a half years ago. Their parents are French expats and they had lived in Mumbai before moving to Casablanca. The kids had attended an American school there, but upon moving here they were put into the French school system. Justine had attended the American school from Kindergarten to Second grade, and her parents didn't want her losing her close-to-native-speaker level in English. For more than two years now I see her once a week and we chat, play English games, do a bit of drama, read, draw, write and much more. I've loved getting to know her and she is a lovely girl, full of intelligence and sympathy. 

Julien only had one year of Kindergarten in English while in India, so while his English is much better than it would have been otherwise, he needed more structured lessons. His receptive skills are extremely good, but though he makes himself understood easily his speaking skills aren't like that of his sister. We've done lots of work with vocabulary and constructions and played many games these past few years, and I've loved spending time with that little red-haired ball of energy. He is a truly sweet kid with a big, big heart.

This weekend they're moving back to France, and I'm truly sad to see them go. When I was there on Tuesday for my last classes with each they both made me these little signs that melted my heart! I'm sure we'll stay in touch and I have a feeling I'll be seeing them again sometime in the future. They'll be outside of Paris so if I ever have an overnight layover or anything I'll know whose door to knock on!

Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree...

I finally found time this weekend to put up our little baby Christmas tree! I think we'll need a larger one in future Christmases... it's getting to be too small for the ornaments I want to put on it! There's not tons of Christmas-y stuff that I get exposed to here, so forgive this rather-too-enthusiastic picture post. 

Before....

and after!

On the 6th my friend Elena picked me up and took me to an annual Christmas fair organized by an English-speaking charitable group, and while most items were a bit above my budget I got some nice ornaments, these included. I had a lovely time there with her three kids and her mom, even if conversation was hard since their main language at home is Russian, and her mom doesn't speak anything else! In the car on the way there her mom was reciting some of the English rhymes she learned in class at school in Russia long ago. It was so fun to hear them and see how English was taught in the USSR! I had a really lovely time with all of them and am so happy I got to go.

I seriously love these little girls! They'e so cute!

And so is this lil guy, right?

We have shiny walls.

The only pinecones I've ever seen in Morocco are these, spray-painted silver and bought in a pack of 12 from GiFi, a French store that's a cross between a dollar store and a  that Target doesn't have clothes or food. In the mountainous regions I'm sure there must be trees that have pinecones, but I don't remember ever seeing one!

A couple days ago, after I took the initial pictures, some little happy guests arrived under our tree!

And I finally just got the right tape to put our stockings up!

Erik

Some tragic news came from over the ocean to us this past week. My beautiful sister Isabel's boyfriend suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm on their college campus in Minnesota on Monday. Erik's funeral is today in Iowa, where my older brother Patrick has traveled to support our sister. My parents were able to join her late Monday night at her college and be with her during those first difficult hours. They had met Erik the month previously and were all devastated.

Though I hadn't met him, his kindness and positivity really shined through the few pictures and anecdotes I had seen and heard. He and Isabel had been good friends since last year and he was well loved in their community. I desperately wish I could be with my sister during this trying time. Please keep her, Erik, his friends and his family in your thoughts and prayers.

Here is my mother's post about the loss, here is an announcement by their college of funeral services and memorials, and here is his obituary. 

Here is Isabel's memorial to him, a testament of her strength of character and the beauty of both their souls.

Please join with me today in supporting everyone attending the funeral today, wishing them strength, comfort and peace despite this tragic loss.

There is no better way to end this post than with Erik's own voice, lifted up in song.

Choir practice

Yesterday on the seventh of December my choir had an out-the-the-ordinary extra-long Sunday rehearsal. It was the first Sunday practice we've had this year, and it was great. As often happens during Sunday rehearsals when the natural light comes in, our director asked me to bring my camera and document the day so they can use the pictures for promotion on the choir's official Facebook page.

 

We worked a lot on a song that was written specifically for our choir by a contemporary Moroccan composer, and he came and joined us to see our progress and give us tips. It's an extremely challenging and not very rewarding song, so getting a bit of recognition for our hard work was very motivating. Once we get to the end it'll surely sound very different, and we got a glimpse of that yesterday. We'd been just muddling through, but it seemed to finally start coming together with its creator watching us, which had us all breathing a small sigh of relief.

Our director also had everyone do some breathing exercises with balloons! It was a great photo-op and a way to practice limiting our exhalation, which leaves us with more breath for the challenging songs we're doing.

Also, a subgroup of the choir will be doing a song called Rain Dance by Karl Jenkins (unfortunately the extra rehearsals conflict with my schedule otherwise I'd be part of it) and we practiced making rain for them. It sounded much more like rain than I'd have anticipated!

At the end of the rehearsal which lasted most of the afternoon we had a mini potluck, for which I brought a coconut flour carrot cake that was a big hit. It's actually a recipe for carrot muffins which I baked in a loaf pan with plenty of walnuts and raisins, so not really cake-like. It was very funny trying to highlight the difference between cake/cupcakes and muffins while explaining why it wasn't very sweet. I'm not 100% sure I succeeded, but I tried! Oh and no picture of the cake, it was gobbled down too quickly!

Marrakech- Terres D'Amanar

I was going through my pictures on Picasa this week and realized there was an entire album full of pictures that I meant to post about and never did! It's almost embarrassing how old these are—they're from our trip to Marrakech last March when we visited Terres D'Amanar.

Terres D'Amanar is a difficult place to explain. Basically it's an adventure park with ziplines, treetop obstacle courses, hikes and the like. I had heard of it long ago, and when in and around Marrakech Othman and I had considered going there more than once, but never quite made it. Despite the descriptions I'd heard I wasn't and our perusal of its website, we still weren't sure exactly what we would find there, but I was determined that that trip would see us visiting this fabled place in Oukaimden's foothills.

We woke up earlier than we might have otherwise on Saturday the 22nd of March, and headed towards the mountains. I love the drive from Marrakech to Oukaimden—the flat, hot, semi-arid desert landscape is much more heavily populated than seems likely, and feels like it will stretch forever around the road. You drive for 20 or 30 minutes once having left Marrakech, enter a small town, and when you emerge on the other side you're suddenly in a green valley, with hills and mountains stretching up and forward, blocking out the sky. It's an incredibly sharp and breathtaking transition.

We then headed into the Ourika valley and kept our eyes peeled for a sign indicating where to turn off the main road. Once we did see it I could hardly believe it wasn't misplaced—the road it told us to turn on wasn't much more than a mud path almost entirely made of potholes, wide enough for no more than one car. But turn we did, and followed it up and around, up and around.

Knowing Terres D'Amanar to be quite expensive, and a popular attraction for schools and tourists (mostly Moroccan) alike, at first I was surprised to see that the road was in such a state of disrepair. But then I remembered that in this country a pot-holed road isn't going to stop anyone, and if it isn't going to stop anyone then no one is going to bother fixing it. It's one of those Catch-22s that made me wish the King would decide to visit there, because anytime the King is passing through somewhere not only does the trash get cleaned up and flags get put out everywhere, but entire roads get repaved!

The road seemed like it would never end, and the cars (and even the tractor above) that we met coming the other way made me convinced we'd all die as we edged around each other extremely close to one precipice or another. Nevertheless, the views on journey were stunning. 

Finally, once I had almost given up hope of ever reaching there, we saw an entrance gate, made our business known and passed through. This guy was there to greet us, and we found our way to the parking lot. 

At the ticket booth we considered our options and decided on a course that included five ziplines over huge drops into valleys far below and two long suspended bridges to cross. The next group would leave in an hour or so, and we had some time to kill. I wandered around and took some pictures.

When the group before ours was making the last leg of their course we were able to watch and snap some pictures (we of course were not going to take a camera or phone with us on a zipline so have no pictures of ourselves doing it). Othman has a pretty strong fear of heights and was looking a bit pale, but I felt nothing but excitement. I told him the bridges looked easy-peasy but the ziplines were probably going to scare me. He nodded silently and didn't say much at all.

After a 3 minute training introduction and suiting up with harnesses and helmets we were off to the first suspension bridge along with four other 20-something Moroccans. Our harnesses got strapped onto the wire cables and we were off, stepping gingerly on the wooden slats with WIDE spaces between each. I. Was. Terrified. Halfway across going at a snail's pace (and it was LONG) my hands started cramping because I was holding on so tight. One of the Moroccans ahead thought it'd be fun to bounce up and down and make the entire bridge jerk around, and with wide eyes I held on for dear life. Interestingly, Othman, with his vertigo (and the view below was gorgeous but very far down) was just fine behind me. Once we reached solid ground again I asked him how on earth he had stayed so calm, and it turned out to be the engineer in him—having inspected the harness and the bridge and deeming us to be safe, he had no fears. Take a look here for a short video that shows the scary bridge (the picture below is the second one) and gives you an idea of what its like.

That done, it was zipline time, and oh how fun that was! Flying through the cold mountain air with nothing but wind and birds in your ears was magical, and the views were just lovely. Five ziplines of different lengths and in different areas certainly were not enough.

All in all, despite the bumpy ride up, the rather high price and the surprises we had on the course itself, we will most definitely be returning to Terres D'Amanar! Having done the Parcours Arien, next time I want to try the Accro Park which promises to be a totally different experience. Along with horseback riding, kids areas, restaurants, hiking and more, this place offers something for everyone and it definitely worth a visit.