The Third Week

My goodness this has been a crazy week. In terms of preparing lessons for my students it has been much easier, but I have still had class changes so there are still student's names that I don't know, which is kind of sad. I will briefly say that the inner workings of our company are quite interesting, and sometimes I feel like our whole program is on thin ice, and could collapse at any time if the wrong thing were to happen. So who knows, maybe I'll be back sooner than I thought?

We leave for school everyday an hour or so early to prep, although we usually stand around and talk for 40 minutes since we have no resources here to help us yet. This week we passed by a truck with camels on the back which we thought was funny. We managed to get a picture.

Teaching English to my students has been a good experience. I have thought about our language in ways that I never have before. Every time I tell my students how to pronounce certain words they always bring up another word that is spelled similarly but pronounced completely different which makes it difficult. It is hard for them because I think Arabic is more of a phonetic language. Although my students have an extremely hard time with English vowels because Arabic is written without vowels. Englsh sntncs wld lk mr lk ths f w wrt tht wy (English sentences would look more like this if we wrote that way) Whenever they spell words they almost always mess up the vowels. Its almost as if they cannot hear the difference between certain vowels. They also can't hear the difference between P and B very well and Sh and Ch. Some of my students are doing really well, but I have 1 or 2 in each class who aren't moving at a very fast pace. During one of my breaks a student came up to another teacher and myself as we were eating to ask a question about attendance. As he was leaving he gave us both a card and said "this is very very good" We looked at the card and it was a card for us to go and look at a website about Islam. So he was proselytizing to us which I thought was kind of cool. That was the first time that has happened to me here and I thought it was kind of nice of him to show concern for us.

As for other things this week we had a pretty good weekend. I wish food was as cheap in America as it is here. The many restaurants here are a pretty good deal. Last night we went to a pretty good restaurant and I got a nice BBQ fish dinner and hummus for about 6 dollars, which in the states would have cost more like $16. There is one street that has almost entirely all chocolate stores. We went to one bakery (patisserie) where everything made there was by the most acclaimed baker in Saudi Arabia, and that was also pretty cheap and incredible. I only wish electronics were as cheap here, but unfortunately it is about the same as in the states. That is all for now. Hopefully I'll have some more interesting news in the future.