How my left handedness and undiagnosed dyslexia are a good thing after all.

Above I've tried to give the English equivalent of each Arabic letter

Note the striking similarities between the Arabic above, and this picture I drew when I was little. 

       Since today wasn't particularly interesting I thought I'd take this opportunity to show you guys a bit of Arabic and explain how it works.  Arabic reads right to left. There are three long vowels. An eeee sound an uuuu sound and an aaaa sound. The other vowels or short vowels are not actually written out- meaning you have to guess what they are. There are no capital letters in Arabic, however each letter looks different depending on whether it starts the word, is in the middle of the word, or ends the word.  You can see in the Burger King example that the جlooks different in the middle/end of the word. Imagine only hvng vwls somtms? That is what reading in Arabic looks like. After a bit, it gets easier to remember where the vowels should be however the only text that is fully voweled (properly) is the Qur'an.
      

       Today was a pretty difficult day school wise. We have two local women who are studying to become Arabic teachers working with us as TAs. Today, one of them lead the discussion part of the class. SHE TALKS SO FAST. But unfortunately, this is the norm. When listening to people other than my professor I am lucky to make out 20% of what they say.  We arrived back at Ziyara Inn around 1:30. I made myself a pb sandwich and started the wejib (homework) for the night. Tonight's wejib took me like at least 6 hours all together.  Today's activities were particularly hard as we had to watch a real PBS like program in Arabic about Ibn Battuta. Sure, he was a cool dude and all and traveled basically everywhere in the middle east a long time ago but by hour 2 of trying to figure out what was going on in this video I had had enough.  I took a break and decided to go back to the lady gym for an exercise class. They were offering step today. The teacher was the same as last time (Guys! It's like I found a new Omar! Even though she is a lot less buff, hot, manly and not Colombian, their English levels are comparable). The participants were a lot of the same women too.   Once again we jjumpng jjjjaaked and sweat to outrageously loud American music as she screamed in English. The class was actually like, really really hard.  Not too hard as in exhausting but rather the combinations were like 10 minutes long each! She was having us like spin jumping on the step and run around it and crazy moves that I still donnnn't really worked to the music. It seemed like everyone in the room already knew the combinations so hopefully I will get better as I go to the class more (Insha allah ((God willing-what you say in arabic instead of hopefully)))
         After class I got falafel from the 30 cent guy, some more fruit from the fruit guy, (I really have to start learning these guys names!) and went back to work on the homework for the night. 4 hours later I was finished and now I am here, sitting in bed.  :)
!أحبكم
(Ahumbkum- I love you all!)