Today I managed by the grace of accustomed wake up times not to be late for class. For some reason my alarm was set for 8am but I woke up at 7:15a, only 15 minutes late. Nicely my roommate knocked just after I got up to make sure I knew what time it was since usually I wake her up at 7 on my way to the shower. So the morning was a bit hurried but not by much.
We started off today in amiya by trying to come up with phrases and vocabulary we might need for our filming assignment. We were also told that now every day we are all responsible for bringing in some amiya (dialect) word or phrase and talking about it to the class or having the teacher explain it to us. This just seems fairly silly to me.
In MSA class we were actually fairly serious and Hussein went over grammar with us and once again it was much clearer when he explained it when compared to the book’s attempts at explaining it. In the second third of class we discussed the reasons for Christian immigration from the Middle East and went over the reasons the text in the book gave for it.
We also got our weekend homework assignment: write the first half of our research paper. I am fairly annoyed because I had been hoping to go to office hours on Monday to go over some of the terms from Dune with Hussein but obviously I had to move that today. But then I found out that the office closed at 1 because of the trip…so I’ll just have to write around that part. We also have a day long trip to Baalbek tomorrow so my time to actually do this is limited. I was going to try and go to Beiteddine to see the palace of the Ottoman emir but I’m thinking that’ll have to wait so I can not-fail my class. My remaining free time here is so limited!
The last third of the day involved a program-wide trip to the National Museum. It had a pretty good but only medium-sized collection of items from Lebanon’s long history from the Phoenicians on to the Islamic era. Apparently during the civil war the artifacts were either surrounded by concrete or walled up in the basement to prevent people from stealing them or knowing they were there. We did not get to see the film on the restoration of the artifacts and the museum after the civil war and I’m told it’s very good.
After the museum, Stephanie, Teresa, Sarah, Jessica and I went to Zaatar W Zeit to get some lemonade and a snack since it was incredibly hot outside today and we wanted to cool down and get something to drink. After ZWZ I went back to my room to take a nap and didn’t wake up until about 7. Later, around midnight, we watched The Jungle Book in Arabic. Sadly it was in Egyptian Arabic, although that’s not really surprising considering Egypt is the largest film producer in the Arabic speaking world.
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