Hey, I Actually Can Speak Some Arabic! Kinda!

Hey, I Actually Can Speak Some Arabic! Kinda!

Last night Blake and I had our first meeting with our new Arabic tutor, Muhammad, who is probably the favorite tutor of foreign graduate students and research fellows in Cairo. I was a little nervous since Blake and I brilliantly didn't have much of a plan in terms of what we wanted to cover and how we wanted to split up the time, but it actually worked out quite well in the end. At least once a week, we'll have class together with Muhammad in which we just read an article in the paper out loud and then discuss it. It's the kind of obvious exercise I never really did successfully in CASA that somehow seems to work really well now. All things considered, it's kind of sad that I'm sharing Arabic tutoring sessions with Blake (even if he the beloved Tufl ma3gazz of the entire ALI faculty), but I really enjoyed yesterday and learned a lot. I've also been studying vocab from the first Media Arabic textbook, which has already been incredibly helpful (and I haven't even finished the first quarter of the book) - the sooner I start filling the gaping whole in my knowledge that is vocabulary, the better.

What else. Job hunt: still sucks monkey nuts. At least I finished that interview I've been trying to translate for over a week. Not my best work, but it's good practice, I suppose. I went browsing in the AUC bookstore this afternoon for some inspiration: Paddy Fermor, Freya Stark and Ella Maillart were all there to taunt me with their ridiculous exploits and page-popping prose. There was a spark of an idea for a project in there somewhere...except that I'm supposed to be looking for a respectable desk job. Right. Sigh.

(Btw, I wish I could take credit for the brilliant photo, but I can't - I ganked it from a story the NYT ran a few months ago on sleep.)