It was a little harder to adjust to the schedule this semester, especially with the staggering of some of the classes - we all used to have classes at the same time but due to the electives/availability of the teachers there are great variations in student schedules. As of late though there are outside factors that have further impacted class times. To start, I chose a university class last week at Moulay Ismail on issues in Arabic syntax - I took two classes on syntax at Maryland, which were more broad, so I'm looking forward to focusing exclusively on issues in Arabic. The morning class though conflicted with the morning classes at the center on Thursdays, so our director went ahead this past week and adjusted our schedule so that I can attend both my university class and classes at the center.
That change was easy enough but a couple of weeks ago now, we received the bad news that our Egyptian teachers were unable to renew their visas, and one by one they've had to return to Egypt in order to get the issue resolved. They're expected to come back after spring break, if all goes well. When the first teacher left last week, we slightly adjusted/combined classes and so there was not much of an initial impact, however the second teacher (who exclusively teaches Translation) left on Tuesday and the last teacher (who exclusively teaches Egyptian dialect) leaves tomorrow - of course without any Egyptian teachers it's impossible to continue Egyptian dialect classes! The solution seems to be Skype classes with them through the university of Alexandria - we had our first sessions on Thursday for Translation which were mostly successful! Next week we have a completely altered schedule due to the Skype classes, but hopefully it will only be in place for the few days before break.
The "general craziness" just relates to life in Morocco - we've had some minor Internet outages (the longest was almost 3 days) as well as a power outage (thankfully that was resolved in less than 12 hours) at the apartment, and Skype still isn't working as it should - I went ahead and bought a three-month VPN membership since it's hard to tell when video calling will be restored. Protests by the teacher trainees are continuing (I accidentally walked into one at Sahat L'Hadim the other day) so the government seems to be hanging tough.
The weather continued to be unusually warm up until this past week, when Monday we got hit with heavy rain and hail! This brought in a cold front that has stuck around and has especially been noticeable at night. No snow though! Thankfully our taste of Meknes winter will be short - it's supposed to warm up during the day in the coming week.
Even with all of the weird and wonderful challenges thrown our way, we're hanging in there and looking forward to a well-deserved break!