Beirut Day 35 – July 28, 2009

I felt a lot better the next morning although my stomach was still a bit knotted and so I subsisted on crackers for most of the day and had a very very light dinner. In amiya class we watched some of the video presentations of other students.

In MSA we watched the second half of a movie called Al-Muttabaqi (which might very roughly be translated as like, the remaining one, or the one that remains) which is a loosely based on the novel Return to Haifa by Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani. I had missed the first half by being sick but even then it was interesting and I was properly on edge for the dramatic ending.

We also got the schedule for the final week. Monday we will have normal class, Tuesday and possibly Wednesday will consist of oral presentations, Wednesday is review (and the dialect exam) and the due date for the research paper, Thursday is the final exam and Friday is graduation. Then of course I leave on Saturday.

After what must be said was a rather boring lecture on learning Arabic which was also not nearly as informative as I thought it could have been, I met Teresa to take care of our amiya/dialect video project. We went to Al-Furat Publishers bookstore, which we had been to previously with our teacher Hussein. The owner, Maria Teresa (Maria Terez in her pronunciation) was really nice and more than happy to have us do our project in her shop so long as she didn’t have to be on camera, thus she became our camera woman. We basically did a short little bit where we come in, talk to her, ask her for recommendations and she shows them to us. She enjoyed it a lot and was even happier when she understood that we actually wanted to buy the books too. I bought two books by Lebanese author Amin Maalouf; The Rock of Tanios and Samarkand. I bought them in Arabic but they are actually translations because Maalouf writes in French. Teresa bought a book of poetry. I actually got a discount on the books. Instead of being 40,000LL (about $25) I got them for 25,000 (about $17). Go me.