I now live with two girls, Rosanna and Maria, one italian and one norweigan, both studying at the uni and an italian/belgian guy who teaches french and spanish here. His name's Jackomo!! We also have a pet goldfish called Bola which means bubble in Italian! (Fabs you can verify this if you're reading it).
The only problem is my housemates and all their italian friends who keep coming over think i'm called sarah. Hattie isn't a name that really works in the middle east because in colloquial arabic it means "give me"! So i've been using sarah which is my middle name as it's much easier than harriet. Thing is i'm harriet at the uni here because that was on all my forms and many of my english friends still call me hattie...all in all a little confusing.
First week of uni has been ok...there doesn't appear to be a particular structure to the course we just jump around between grammar, listening then get photocopied sheets to translate or to read and talk about but EVERYTHING is in arabic and supposedly we get fined for speaking english and can't even use an arabic to english dictionary - it should be arabic to arabic! I'm managing to follow what is going on most of the time but explaining vocab can be interesting! Luckily our teacher has a sense of humour and often we end up virtually playing pictionary or sharades as he tries to explain arabic vocab to us using other words we don't understand! Atleast it should improve my arabic! We have lectures sunday till thursday from 9am till 1pm, although we have 3 breaks during this time! I may be doing an intensive colloquial course for a month for 3 hours every evening starting next week as well so what with that and homework i think i may be quite busy!
Friday and saturday are the weekend here so hopefully i'll be able to do some travelling and explore more of syria on those days. Last thursday myself and a few other students from the uni went for a bbq at Ahmed's friend's house in the countryside. It was nice to get outside the city for a bit and the food was amazing!!
I have never exactly shown vegetarian tendencies so unsurprisingly the large amounts of chicken, beef and even camel were right up my street! Camel is actually quite nice and similar to beef but a little lighter. We stayed at the house chatting and learning a few rather amusing syrian card games afterwards and didnt get back to the city until around 5am. This place doesn't seem to sleep ever though and there were still a fair amount of people around as we walked through the old city and many lights were still shining both in mosques and houses.
Ok so my time in this cafe is up so i shall leave it there.
No comments:
Post a Comment