Our new housemate came yesterday. I wondered if we were going to get our “required” German student. We have always (with a small gap) had at least one German here since I’ve been here. Simon is from Austria, I’d say that’s close enough. Anyway, he showed up and needed to eat. He doesn’t know a lick of Arabic so he depended on me for everything. He’s a lot like I was when I first got here. To him, I’m as fluent as a native speaker even though I know all too well my limitations with this language. Anyway, I took him to eat and talked to the waiter and got our food with no problem. <\/p>\n
We both stayed out late last night (more about that later) but he went with Henry and the girls to the Russian club and I went to Luchiano’s house. He woke up quite late and missed his driver from work. He borrowed my phone to call in. I could hear him say, “No, don’t send a driver, it’s my fault, I’ll just take a cab…” I didn’t have time to ask him how he was “Just” going to take a cab when he can’t talk to any of the drivers or negotiate a fare. I got dressed and walked him down to a waiting cab. I asked the driver if he knew the university on the street that Simon was given over the phone. The cabbie responded that there wasn’t one on that street. I had no idea where Simon wanted to go, so I was strictly a translator. We figured out that Simon had been given some bad information. Eventually, I thought<\/em> I knew where he wanted to go, but since he didn’t speak any Arabic, had no phone, and had no Yemeni money, I told him that he’d better call for a driver. If the cabbie and I were wrong, God only knows where he’d end up and God only knows how he’d get back.<\/p>\n It was a bit of a hassle this morning, but it did allow me to realize how far I’ve come with my Arabic. I had no trouble with anything really. I still miss some words, and there are plenty that I still don’t know but I have come a long way. I feel much better about my Arabic skills, and my potential for learning the more advanced stuff as well. It just takes time…<\/p>\n Our new housemate came yesterday. I wondered if we were going to get our “required” German student. We have always (with a small gap) had at least one German here since I’ve been here. Simon is from Austria, I’d say that’s close enough. Anyway, he showed up and needed to eat. He doesn’t know a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arabic"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}