Today is the last day of our first week in Syria. We nearly lost our minds when we went to buy our phone on the 6th and it took hours to process. We were at our all time low; we couldn’t get in touch with our teacher that we really wanted to study with, apartments are a lot more expensive than they should be because of the many refugees living here, and we couldn’t even buy the phone that would help everything fall into place.
Bobby turned to me and asked, “Why don’t we go and live in Ethiopia for 6 months?” I was shocked that he even began to think that way before we even got started. Sure enough, as soon as we got the phone everything started to fall into place. We got in touch with our teacher. The reason why we couldn’t find the school was that they had moved locations literally two days before we arrived inSyria. So we made arrangements to see him that night to talk about our classes and to also start looking into housing.
We have already had our first class that consisted of learning the alphabet. I am thrilled that it isn’t nearly as complicated as it looks. As I thought, Bobby has a real knack for picking up the letters and numbers. Our teacher said that Bobby’s writing looks like an Arab’s! Well, 3 hours of class down, 177 to go! We chose to learn the local dialect of Arabic instead of the classical or Modern Standard. Since we are studying in Ammiya, we hope to get much more practice since we will be able to talk with people on the streets. Our teacher thinks that we will be able to communicate in the colloquial form after two months of study.
We are still in the hotel and looking nearly every day for a room. We enjoy staying in the hotel. We have really enjoyed the people here. But the money does add up, so hopefully next week we will be in our own place.
