Beirut Day 28 – July 21, 2009

My amiya teachers have been using the strategy of finding Lebanese music videos and using the lyrics to teach us about the various grammar tenses. It’s worked fairly well so far but got a little weird with the latest one. The song used to teach us about past tense conjugation was definitely hard rock and not Lebanese-feeling at all. It was also sort of about domestic violence…so that was rather odd.

We had our second day of teacher switching again in FusHa. We also went over the topics for our 1500 word final research paper. It doesn’t seem that long but it is about twice the longest thing I’ve written in Arabic. My topic is – of course, for those of you that know me – about the Arabic and Islamic influences on the scifi novel Dune by Frank Herbert. I’ve been rereading it lately and it’s the first time I’ve read it since I’ve learned much more detailed information about Islam and more Arabic. It’s really astounding how much is in there. It should either be fun or obnoxiously difficult to write about.

As with regular Tuesday afternoons we had a movie. We were supposed to watch a movie about the civil war called Zuzu but it froze about two minutes in so instead we watched two short films. The first one was called The Chair, about two brothers who are trying to find their dead brother’s chair which they accidentally broke and threw away. The younger of the two, who could not have been more than 7, was absolutely adorable, especially his manner of talking. The second short film was incredibly weird and I don’t even remember the title. It was basically a (purposeful) compilation of all the Lebanese stereotypes.

Teresa, Jessica, Stephanie, Claire and I all had dinner at Olio’s, which was fun. Afterwards I went back to my apartment to finish up the homework, of which there was thankfully little. I was also surprisingly studious and did some vocabulary review.