Mumtastic!

So, classes. We took an Arabic placement test last week, written and oral, with results given last Thursday. Good, fine, I got into the class I think is appropriate for me, and we started our Arabic classes on Sunday. Oh yes, my friends, Sunday. The Islamic holy day is Friday, and their weekend runs Friday-Saturday - one can deduce from this, then, that my school week is Sunday-Thursday. It's going to take a while to get used to. If you're appalled by the thought of having to go to school or work on a Sunday, please note this: American Muslims have to work on Fridays. Majority rules, and this country is 94% Muslim.

Anyway. My first Arabic class was Sunday from 2:00 until 4:50. Nope, not a misprint. I have three straight hours of Arabic on Sundays. And Tuesdays. And Thursdays. On top of that, we have a class on the colloquial Jordanian dialect every Monday and Wednesday from 9:30 - 10:50. Plus a listening section on Wednesdays from 11 to 12. Yes, I'm going to drown in this language. It'll be intense, and difficult, and wonderful, and all of that. But if I'm going to spend (let's do the math here) 170 + 80 + 170 + 80 + 60 +170 minutes each week on Arabic and Arabic alone - folks, that's over twelve hours - it will also be BLAND.

Thankfully, this is not only an Arabic program. It's titled "Language and Culture," and starting next week, it will live up to that name. In addition to all that Arabic, we take two Monday/Wednesday area studies courses. The list has some really great options, and I had a hard time deciding. My top three choices were:

1. Jordan and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

2. Contemporary Arab women writers.

3. Structure of Arab societies.

Bad news bears: they're all offered at 3:30. To make scheduling easier, they put all of the area studies courses into two time slots. This unfortunately left me with a tougher choice to make. I had no strong and deep desire that ranked any one of the 2:00 classes above the others. Please don't think that the problem is with the course material being boring or uninteresting. Quite the opposite: I liked them all equally. The three I was choosing from were:

1. Environment and politics of water.

2. America and the Arabs.

3. Contemporary thought in the Islamic world.

Such cool stuff! I ran a very unofficial poll of Fb friends, and they came up with... no real consensus. I think there was a slight leaning toward America and the Arabs, but it seemed every person had a different opinion on what was most interesting. I chose, drumroll please, America and the Arabs. The water class sounds the most fascinating, but I heard it's a really basic class and doesn't teach anything new. That, combined with the issues I might have transferring it in to VCU, ruled it out. As far as Contemporary Islamic thought goes, the title seems better that the course itself. The description sounds just like VCU's intro to Islam class. Either the people here are selling themselves short in these descriptions, or they're having a lot of fun making titles. I'm not sure. In the end, I decided on America and the Arabs. Not only does it sound like it will transfer in easily, but it offers the opportunity to study with graduate students in UJ's American Studies program.

But that's next week. This one is purely Arabic, getting acclimated to campus and buildings and professors and all that whatnot. My Arabic professor teaches both our fus'ha (formal) and amiyah (colloquial) classes. Even though most classes have different professors for the two, we see Professor Amjad every day of the week. Good thing/bad thing? Good. Aside from his handwriting, he does everything quite clearly. And this guy is hilarious. "Mumtaz" is an Arabic word meaning something like "amazing!" or "fantastic!" He likes to mix the two and say "mumtastic!" for everything good. I laugh every time. He gets so overly excited that it's just infectious.

And so, dear readers and commenters, I would like to get overly excited about you all. I would like to let you know how much it means to me to hear from you. Even life in a noisy Arab household and a giant bustling city gets quiet sometimes. You are all simply amazing, purely fantastic, even mumtastic!