Godfather was GREAT!!!!!! I have finally seen all of Godfather I (and understood it, swei...) and next week I'm going to see Part II. I love seeing all these movies in Arabic!! I think this is the best way to learn Arabic, by watching stuff that I know (or is easy to understand) in the other language. I'd say watch TV shows or movies, which works as well, but it's harder first off because all the old movies are from Egypt (very different pronunciation) and they just don't catch my interest as much. I DO like that in the mornings, Shireen and Maher watch the news. I still don't understand it but at least I'm listening and watching. Especially in the morning on weekends, I'm not doing homework.
Guess what!! I'm done with midterms!! Took long enough? And the greatest thing is finals are in a month. Whatever; as Allison (the head of CIEE) always says, you're in Jordan [not in America]. And at least they're done. I did pretty well too; minus listening, they're coming back with very acceptable grades. And I'm learning, much more than I have a college so far, so if my grades aren't at my usual par I don't care. I've said it once and I'll say it again; it's more important to me to sit with the family at night and listen to them talk than to lock myself in my room and study. One of the big things I've learned from abroad is school isn't everything. (And anyway, I AM studying. I'm increasing my Arabic listening skills and my knitting skills. :P )
My classes this past week have been great. First, on Sunday we started learning a song in Saleh's class called "Words" (Kalimat). My homework this week has been to learn the song, and next sunday I'm performing it. What a shame, me having to sing for extra credit! :) :) Also, Saleh is NUTS! When we learned about...something a bunch of units ago we learned the word locusts and he acted it by looking like Godzilla. So this week, in the song, our words included feather ("you make me feel like a feather floating in the breeze") and stars ("you say I'm your treature, better than a thousand stars"). To show us stars, Saleh enacted Godzilla with his hands clawing the air above his ears, and feather was the same thing except the hands were kind of floating side-to-side together.
Then in Ghadeer's class (amiyya/colloquial) we listened to 2 songs yesterday and will listen to more on monday. Yesterday we had one kid's song "Shater Shater" about how to be a good boy (listen to your parents, don't fidget, don't anger your teacher, etc). Then we learned another fully Jordanian song about this girl, well this guy was stricken by a girl. So her barette made his heart beat faster; her sideburns made him go weak at the knees; her sassy walk with the shiny skirt (I learned how to say shiny in Arabic!!!)...stop, you're going to kill me!!! And of course, all the pent-up sexual tension people feel come out in songs. The class was rolling the entire time. Especially when my teacher spent 5 minutes trying to come up with the right words because if she didn't get the exact literal translation that would be BAD. It was a very good class.
This past weekend was both great and terrible. It was great because last Tuesday(?) Maher said "Lilah, Aala' (Suher's oldest son) is racing on Friday. Come with, sign up for it too." And I said OK. I had no idea what it was, whether it was an actual race or what kind of cars (go-karts) or anything, but hey why not. Maher kept jumping between saying I was gonna get 1st place and I he was gonna come watch to laugh at me (to which I said "me too!!!") Turns out it was a regular go-kart track, and you signed up and 6-10 people at a time raced and at the end of the day the fastest speeds got prizes (like a laptop and a ps3). I raced twice; the 1st time i wasn't last (so proud!) and the second time i beat my old time (31 sec instead of 32) but everyone else had been going for a while so they got under 30 sec. Tons of fun. The bad part of the weekend was I also got a cold which is FINALLY going away, alhamdulilleh.
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