Oh Right, School.

On Monday, after the national holiday, I returned to the university to begin another month of class. I am definitely grateful to be back in school after a long break, and this class in particular looks promising. It started out with eight students and has now shrunk to six (two opted to advance to level seven); our professor, Huda, is firm and a good teacher with a lot of personality and a good sense of humor, and even our sessions with the listening professor, Abdurabuh (his name means ‘worshipper of his god’), are off to a good start.

Our class is made up of two Korean girls, one British guy, two Americans (myself and a graduate from Yale) and one Swiss woman. The students who left were American and British as well, and I was not sad to see them go since they were both a little bit of know-it-alls, though I still can’t understand how the American kid knows so much (Liz, he’s another Spokaner! so no wonder he is crazy) because this is the first time he has ever studied Arabic in a university/classroom setting, or even with a professor, or even with anyone he can actually speak Arabic with. Instead he studied on his own for three years (on the side, while he got his degrees in computer science, political science and Islamic studies), making it through all three Al-Kitaabs (the standard Arabic textbook in the US), and apparently learned to speak from listening to internet programs—all of which are seemingly impossible.

Class usually begins with a discussion about the news, so yesterday Huda started class by asking us about Ahmedinijad’s speech at the racism conference that singled out Israel and caused attendees to walk out of the room and others to boycott the conference altogether. She noticed that Sammy and myself (the two Americans) stayed quiet for the conversation so she called us out on it and asked if it was because Americans are afraid to talk about politics here. I told her I just don’t like to participate in a discussion, especially in Arabic, if I don’t know what I am talking about, but regardless it started another conversation about the way this country is portrayed in the media as a religiously conservative and closed society and Western perceptions of muhajibeen (women who wear the headscarf/hijab); and although I didn’t suffer from too much culture shock when I arrived due to these misconceived notions, it was nonetheless refreshing to have this kind of conversation with a woman here who dresses conservatively and wears a white hijab and is strong, intelligent, opinionated and well-informed.

She also informed us that we would be responsible for two ! presentations this month, and that since my name was on top of the class list, I would be first to go. Therefore I gave my presentation this morning and used the same subject that I used in my last class (about America’s cultural food crisis) as I never had the chance to finish my presentation last time or open it up to any kind of discussion. This time I had 15 minutes to talk and 30 minutes for discussion and I survived and the class participated and all was well with the world. Then I came home after class and had lunch with my host mother (leftover stuffed grapeleaves from yesterday’s lunch and green beans in tomato sauce) and we were talking about how good the green beans were and how she cooked them with the tomatoes and garlic without boiling them in water in order to retain the flavor and how she used tomatoes that she preserved from last summer because the tomatoes now aren’t any good, and then I turned on CNN afterwards and there was a news story about Japan’s declining economy and how that is pushing more people to eat McDonald’s rather than the traditional healthy (though expensive) Japanese diet and how McDonald’s had record profits in 2008 while the rest of the country/world was falling to pieces. And it all comes together like so.