One of the best parts of learning a new language is watching the kids videos that are used to teach the basics. Yes, Sesame Street dubbed in Arabic is VERY funny. In class today we watched this video that must be from the 80's teaching personal pronouns. It's pretty funny/ridiculous/cheesy/bad. The guy at 55 seconds is my favorite.
Later today in the same class period we were talking about a candy in Jordan. It's a round marshmallow covered in chocolate and it's called "black man's head". To make things even worse There's a picture of a cartoon black face on the front of it. I couldn't believe it when I first saw it. Anyway, we ended up on a tangent talking about whether or not the candy was racist if you're not in America...pretty ridiculous tangent to get on, but my feisty friend Emma who wants to be a lawyer tried to knock some sense into our classmate saying "it doesn't matter where you are, it is inherently racist! it's ridiculous, you're eating a black man's head! not ok" I don't think our Arabic teacher realized we were off on this tangent until that moment when she regained control of the class by saying "it's not racist, it's delicious." I could barely contain myself.
Today in the taxi ride home we were chatting with the taxi driver about how he has a college degree in business finance but has been driving a taxi for 5 years because there are no jobs in Jordan. He said there are jobs in america and he wants to come over, can we invite him? (don't be freaked out this is a normal question to get) we dodged the answer by taking 2 minutes to try to convey that we want to know what "recession" is in arabic. it turns out that Recession is "azma iktisadiyya". Azma is the word used for traffic and iktisad is economics. So economic recession in Arabic is literally "traffic jam of the economy". I wonder if there's a connection between unemployment, or gdp, or economic growth, with how crazy people in that country drive! haha, that'd be fun to measure.
My grandma's house has a big empty lot next to it and yesterday I looked outside my window (which faces the lot) and saw a herd of goats grazing! I couldn't believe my eyes, we are in the MIDDLE OF AMMAN and there's a shepherd taking his goats out to lunch! Adi. Here are some pictures:
Ras el Abed is delicious, your Arabic teacher was right. Sometimes in the USA people get over sensitive about race and take things out of context. Azma is not only a traffic jam it is actually a crisis. However, I like the analogy of a recession being an economic traffic jam, very fresh.
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