shadowsong26

1/4/12

430 pm

today has been pretty thoroughly awesome ^^ class was from 9-1. first we had 2 hours with ustatha nadia, going over the vocabulary and learning the past tense (oh my god conjugations in arabic are so much easier than french :D not quite as easy as japanese, but still!) and starting to go through the first reading passage in our book. then at eleven ustath muhamad came in and went over the rest of the first half of the reading, then we had an hour of local dialect. which is...a little hard to remember, but i took as many notes as i could. it's still a little hard to follow, especially when ustatha nadia and ustath muhamad talk fast, but i was much less lost than yesterday. and i think even of the 210 people in the class (it's a combination or 210 and 250), i'm not one of the more lost ones. ...that sentence was oddly grammared, but oh well. is grammared a word?

after class, me and ka and ke and a and b went to find somewhere to eat, and located this little turkish food place across the street from the university (it's owned by a turkish man and his jordanian wife, and all the kitchen staff are turkish). and the food was sooooo good. and a nice break from what we've been having, which has been various combinations of chicken and rice (which has also been delicious, even considering i'm not particularly fond of rice, but i'm here to explore new things, so yeah). we stayed there for about two hours, hanging out and discussing all kinds of things (a little more cerebral stuff than we discussed over coffee last night, but still. also this was a slightly different group, that was me, b, s, je, ja, and d. but still a muchly fun conversation). then we wandered the city for a while. ran into three students who were also walking home from their classes, and talked for a while with them in a mix of arabic and english. we took lots of pictures wandering around, and stopped by a little store--i needed a folder and some pens, and the others bought postcards--and by a fruit stand where we bought seven kilos of oranges total for like 3.5 dinar. (ka bought first, and she thought they were a half-dinar per orange, then they gave her three kilos. for some reason, b didn't notice while watching and also bought 3 kilos. i figured it out and bought 1, which should last me the rest of the week :D ) then made our way back to the hotel, where i'm chilling for a bit before getting to studying. meeting with ghassan, our faculty advisor from gmu, at around 7.

(all my banner ads are in arabic :D )

day 3