School to home and home to school, I don't know how she does it

Still no luck with pictures. I will try again on Friday. Instead I thought I might talk about what I'm learning and my classes...

My normal schedule is class from 8:30 to 12 (with a tea break at 10:15), which is usually spent going through our textbook and doing all the classwork exercises in order. My teacher really tends to stick to the textbook, which is actually kind of good for me. We are starting on chapter seven (I am in the advanced class based on a test we took at the beginning of the program) and in my Arabic classes in school last year and the year before, we did not use this textbook so I am planning on going through the previous chapters and relearning everything - a lot of it I know, but there is also some grammar stuff that my teacher expects us to know and I don't.

Then at noon we have lunch - they have us alternate between eating lunch here at the American Language Center and at home with our host families. I prefer eating here at the ALC with all the students, because lunch at home is very quiet and usually my host family just watches TV and sleeps afterwards. They have rooms set up for us to nap in after lunch here at the ALC but I haven't had time to use them because I have been blogging and trying to upload photos or doing homework. The food is also a little better for me to eat here - my host family has meat with every meal and while I'm not a vegetarian like Rachel Mulbry (another student who is begging me to put her in this blog), I am definitely not used to eating a lot of meat and I would prefer just vegetables and pasta or bread or something, which is what we usually have here at the ALC. When we eat lunch here, we also have tea around 3, but I usually avoid the mint tea because I am already very sick of it (it is so sweet!).

Then we have two more hours of class in the afternoon, and then home. My teacher assigns us usually two or more hours of homework a night, all from the textbook except for sometimes memorizing a dialogue. I am so thankful for my host sister because I need her help a lot, probably more than I should be using her, but I should get better with time. We just finished learning hobbies ("al-huwayiti," I think) and some boring grammar. Our textbook has DVDs with "Maha" and "Khalid" talking about their families and school and whatnot. Sometimes their dialogues are hilarious - we just watched one with a friend ("sadiqa") of Maha's who said that Maha goes from New York University (where all students of Arab descent in the United States go, apparently) to home and home to NYU and she doesn't know how Maha does it (?). The dialogues are always very dramatic and serious.

So that's really all I can write about... besides this morning I saw a woman in a burqa (covers everything except the eyes) riding a scooter which was interesting. So check the Google photostream sometime after Friday morning and you might see some more photos. Thanks for reading!