Salsa in Rabat!

Last night, I finally felt at home. It wasn't because I found American food, or finally adjusted to everything that was different here. But when the familiar Latin rhythms came on at salsa class and we all started dancing, I felt like I belonged.
I dance a lot in Chicago, and even when I was terribly busy last quarter, I always made time for Monday night salsa. So it was one thing I very much wanted to continue here in Rabat, even though "danse oriental" is the more common offering.
A Google search revealed that there was one salsa group in Rabat with a facebook page. A couple messages later and I was on my way last night to an intermediate lesson in Agdal, Rabat's modern neighborhood. I caught the tram (6 dh each way - cheaper and cleaner and faster than the CTA!) to the Nations Unis stop, excited since I knew the name of the stop in both Arabic and French when the universal feminine announcer's voice named the prochaine estacion.
Mislead by Google maps, I headed down the street in the wrong direction. Luckily I was early, so once I realized the house numbers were far too high and increasing, I turned around and headed all the way north until the street ended in a mind-boggling knot of a five-way intersection. The road had ended...but I hadn't seen the salsa company. Sighing, I gave up and decided to take a taxi. Knocking on the window of a parked Petit Taxi, he rolled it down and I said, in Modern Standard Arabic (fusha), that I wanted to go to the address of the salsa school. He pointed and said, "This is the right street." Since I had just walked all the way up the street from a number much higher than that of the school, I repeated the number. "There, there," he pointed. "Al-shaar3ia intehi huna?" I said, grammatically-incorrectly asking if the street ended where we were standing. "N3m," he said. Yes. Thanking him, I walked away utterly confused. With only five minutes before the lesson theoretically began in the school that was theoretically right in front of me, I headed back down the street from whence I'd came, eyes peeled.
That's when I noticed "Danse Latin" on the sign of a gym I'd passed twice already. I walked in, and a friendly personal trainer came out to meet me. Although I should have been able to ask in darija, I fell into the slightly-more-comfortable fusha and asked about the class. "Yes," he replied, continuing in French.
It's a common happening that no longer phases me. I ask in Arabic, my conversation partner responds in French. I'm clearly a foreigner, and most foreigners know more French than Arabic. So I just have to say, "Je ne parle pas francais" and explain that I speak shwiya - a little - Arabic, and they break into a smile and attempt to communicate. This particular young man spoke some English, which he was eager to show off. After explaining that the class met upstairs and I just had to wait for the instructor, he asked if we could maybe get coffee sometime - so I could practice my Arabic, so he could practice his English. Although it's probably politically incorrect to doubt his intentions, I most certainly did and responded with a hesitant maybe.
I was saved from the awkward situation by the arrival of a regular, and the trainer wandered off with him into the musculation room. I saw a group of people gathering outside head into another door, so I tentatively followed and found myself in a dance studio surrounded by the familiar salsa beat.
Class went well - just about my level, fast-paced, lots of partner rotations so I didn't feel bad that I was a new addition who threw off the balance. The language of instruction was a combination of French and darija, with English borrowings thrown in at just the right time: "Five, six, seven, eight" rotated between French, Italian, English, Spanish, and Arabic; we were cued by a loud "Go!". There was an American guy in the class, but he already had Moroccan friends and didn't seem eager to regress to talking to a fellow countryman, so I tried to resist asking him to translate for me when anything more than a short instruction was given in French.
Luckily, the class repeats each Monday and Wednesday, so I have plenty of time to make Moroccan friends of my own.