Entering the IEP Gauntlet: Let the Games Begin!!!

On Friday night, a few of us fended off jetlag long enough to enjoy the nightlife in Rabat. We hit up a nightclub for a couple hours of of gringo dancing, silly picture taking, and as much as we tried to resist, watching the MTV music videos that were playing in the background. Aside from a lost cellphone, the night was rather benign.  Nonetheless, after spending most of the day at Chellah most of us were entirely too lazy to pull a second night in a row, so we made the decision to stay in and save our party rocking for Marrakesh.  Instead, we huddled in Meaghan’s room (our building is quite cold at night) for an innocuous, but nonetheless thoroughly entertaining game night.

Party in Room 06! We're playing Spin-the-Bottle, so Don't wake up the R.A.!

We started by resurrecting A-Z, the board game which Meaghan introduced the evening before.  The object of the game is fairly straightforward: You are given a category, and you want to come up with as many examples as possible. Typically, the maximum number of players is 6. On the surface, this would appear problematic, since there 12 of us present, but as many Harvard students know, 12 happens to be a perfect multiple of 6. Using our lateral thinking skills, we divided into teams of 2. Although it was a fast-paced game, we played several rounds. Inevitably, it revealed some of the weirder idiosyncrasies of our already motley crew:

• Sophia and Brian watch way too much figure skating
• Mike and Mark both suck at naming famous art museums and car parts (seriously, are they good for anything?).
• Asumi doesn’t read much Shakespeare, but she sure knows a lot about animals.

After a few rounds of total domination (hey, this is my post, I can be a bit liberal in my storytelling…) we switched to another game Meaghan (our gamesmaster) knew, called 3 step charades. We played a massive version of it at the IEP Potluck in December, and good times were had by all. Here are some of the highlights:

• Sameera performing a Tony worthy one-woman interpretive performance of the “Little Mermaid”:



An age-old allegory of  a young hybrid fish-woman coming of age

• Attempting to describe the following concepts in one word: Lionel Messi, Harvard 375^th Anniversary Birthday Cake, harpsichord 
• Attempting to act out the following concepts without words: banana tree, Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Rod Stewart, girlfriend
• Immature humor that is undeniably unbecoming of  Harvard graduate students, and yet in which we continue to be repeat offenders

As Meaghan wrote, it was "a raucous good time." In particular, the charades round is always hysterical. I’m sure some of you wish you were here with us, so on a final note, I thought it might be fun to give you guys a chance to play along, so I have taken the liberty of creating a caption contest at Kana's expense: 

What do you see? 

Leave your answers in the comment section. And as a sidenote, if you have any other questions/criticisms/complaints/affirmations/special requests for our group, please send them our way! We love to hear from you!