Back to the Grindstone!

Cairo, Egypt

Despite having a mountain of homework already on the very first day, I'm glad to be back in class. Seven weeks of summer vacation was too much. I feel like I've forgotten everything I learned in our seven weeks of class! It's good to have something to do, some structure to my days to keep my mind off the daily annoyances of life in one of the world's biggest cities!

All in all, I think the workload might actually be more manageable than it was in the summer. It seems that our teachers have eased off a little bit. With 3 months to complete their syllabi, they don't seem in quite as much of a rush.

Best of all is my colloquial teacher, Marwa. Not only have I been moved up to a higher level that will be more challenging to me, and less drilling of grammar that's quite similar to the Jordanian grammar I know like the back of my hand. I've also now got a teacher who doesn't insist that everyone speaks Egyptian in class. If I do, and plenty of local phonetics and phrases have crept into my colloquial, that's great. But if I want to speak Levantine Arabic, it's not a problem. Marwa merely wants us to understand and be understood.