Ordinary Radical 412

It's been a week in Jordan and I'm getting pretty nicely settled in. It's amazing how much my Arabic has improved in the last week. My two years of studying Arabic at UNC laid a great base, and now being surrounded by it I'm able to finally take off. I'm still working on my colloquial skills however, since a large number of people here don't actually speak the formal Arabic that I've been learning.

At Ali-Baba, my language school, it has been awesome having one-on-one instruction. This week our conversations took some very interesting turns and I had opportunities to discuss some incredibly difficult topics all in Arabic. My second day in class, I told my teacher about a research paper I did on the Palestinian political cartoonist Naji al-Ali (whose character, Handala, I now realize is on about every key chain here), and we launched into an hour long conversation about his work and the Israel-Palestine conflict. More than half the population of Jordan is Palestinian, so it's a pretty hot topic of conversation.

Yesterday, Obama gave his speech in Cairo to the Muslim World. I watched the whole thing, and really liked most of it. I feel like I basically have job security for a while given my interest in the middle east and specifically social entrepreneurship in the region (which Obama promised to support in the future). Additionally, I'm glad that a US president is finally standing up a bit to Israel and supporting a Palestinian state. After the speech, my job for the day was recounting what Obama said in Arabic. Somehow we got on the topic of religion, and I ended up explaining some of the finer points of Christian theology (most notably the trinity and the divinity of Jesus). Wow, it's hard enough trying to explain that stuff in English, try doing it in Arabic. It was a good conversation, and i hope that Senabel and I can have some more talks like that, maybe I'll ask her some questions about Islam. For now though, I'm glad it's the weekend. 4 hours of Arabic a day takes it out of you. Still no pictures, but I'll work on it.