Notes on Classes and Vacation

As a preface to everything else, listen to this song if you want to get a taste of modern Arabic pop music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfXIF2Mm2Kc. It plays every few hours at the café we frequent. Until watching the version available on YouTube, I’d only heard the Arabic lyrics. Only today did I learn that one of the messages of the song is “If you and your child are being run down by riot-shield-wielding police officers, don’t worry; Allah’s there for you!”

We have a midterm exam on Thursday, marking the completion of six credits of Arabic. So far we’ve learned the alphabet and harakat (literally “movement”, the markings are short vowels, silences, elongations, and “n” endings), many greetings and common questions, the numbers through one hundred, various fruit and vegetable names, grammatical rules for when certain letters are pronounced or unspoken, days of the week, month of the year, various time and calendar words (like last, next, this, after, before, etc.), and plenty of other things. And that’s all from the Modern Spoken Arabic (classical) class. MSA is usually only used in media and politics, though it is also used when formality is required and when Arabic speakers from different areas are addressed. In our Spoken Arabic (‘amiya) class, we’ve learned the counterparts to the greetings, times, and numbers, but most of the class in the last couple of weeks has been spent reading and speaking from written conversations. It’s very hard to go from writing and sounding out one or two words at a time to reading full sentences in an alphabet you’re still learning to recognize, but the exercise that doesn’t hurt isn’t effective.

On Monday we left Amman to fly to Sharm el-Sheikh, a resort city on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea. What should have been a relaxing week turned into a trip after which I had to sleep 15 hours to recover. When we weren’t lying out by the pool or swimming and hanging out with the dozen-and-a-half or so who came on the trip, we were snorkeling, eating fantastic food, and finding respite from the oppressive sun in the rooms, where we watched movies in the late afternoon.

The snorkeling was my first experience. We swam about a hundred yards out from the beach before we found any live reefs, but when we found them we spent about five hours diving 25+ feet to see them and the sea life up close. I remarked to Craig after we got out for the day that if someone tried to sell me a waterproof disposable camera for $30, I’d buy it with no hesitation. For the rest of the day my ears hurt from being that deep under water (even equalizing the pressure doesn’t mitigate all the ill effects).

I say “For the rest of the day”, but the days ran together because of an all-night trip on Tuesday. A few people were really interested in hiking Mt. Sinai, so we found a tour company that agreed to give us a special trip off of their usual schedule. We left the resort at 10:30 on Tuesday night and rode a bus for almost three hours before arriving. We got out of the bus and began the trek at 2, passing by St. Catherine’s Monastery on the way (read up on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine's_Monastery,_Mount_Sinai). Not having hiked in quite some time, I climbed with difficulty, but I made it up at the front of the group. The trip up was seven kilometers of uphill walking (I was originally laden with three liters of water, of which I drank two before reaching the peak) followed by 732 steps, and it took us about three hours. We got to the top, climbed to the roof of the old church there, and sat to wait for the sunrise.

It was sublime. The stillness that settled over the place when the light broke over the horizon was thick and beautiful. On a part of the roof shielded from wind, only the light of the morning sun was accessible to my senses. Separated from the world below, broken apart from the rest of the group, I felt an unparalleled calm.

We decided on the trip back down to take the stairs after the 732 steps instead of the longer downhill walk, so we raced our guide down about 3,000 steps, saw the highest mountain in Egypt from a distance, passed by the house of solitude built by the monks of Saint Catherine’s, and took pictures of Craig posing on high rocks against a background of blue sky.

I had been very excited to see the massive collection of documents and icons in Saint Catherine’s, but we would have had to wait about three hours for it to open to the public, and the rest of the group wasn't very keen on that idea. Ever since the field trip to Dumbarton Oaks last semester with Dr. Bayer’s Christian Political Thought class, and the small collection of art from the Age of Iconoclasm we saw, I’ve been interested in seeing more, and this would have been a perfect opportunity but for timing and the will of the group against it. If you didn’t read the Wikipedia article, I’ll mention that The Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai (yes, that’s the full, formal title) is a competitor for the title of oldest working monastery in the world, and it holds the second-largest collection of early codices and manuscripts, outnumbered only by the Vatican. I was very disappointed to have missed it.

The rest of the trip was more snorkeling, more swimming, more excellent food (including Lamb Tagine, which holds the title of Best Meal I’ve Ever Eaten), and more movies. We flew back to Amman yesterday and I slept from 11pm until 2 this afternoon before coming back to the café for the two quarter-final World Cup games with a few people.

I’ll try to keep this updated with slightly better frequency going forward. Two weeks is a long time.

Salaam