Though I've been loving my time in Cairo and am excited to spend the next month here, today I found myself talking about home quite a bit. It started off this morning in class, where we were reviewing our new vocabulary. One word was "architecture," and my teacher mentioned that she liked the architecture in America. Immediately all the students began talking about how beautiful the architecture is at our university, and we pulled up pictures online to show the teacher. She was floored at how gorgeous it was and kept saying that she couldn't believe she really went to school there. We told her that she should come visit us, and we would give her a tour (she replied "in sha allah," meaning "God willing" - it accompanies almost any statement set in the future here). For the first time, I really missed my life in America and felt anxious to return. The mentions of America continued later in the class, when one girl asked an obvious question, then said "Fi Amreeka naqool 'DUH'" ("In America we say 'DUH'"), and we all erupted into laughter. This type of thing happens often in class, when one of us struggles to express something funny in Arabic and can't find the words, but the others all understand the joke and begin laughing while our teacher looks on confusedly. We realized after class today that our one teacher has the same expression and phrase (Hasalan, meaning OK) for when he agrees with us and when he has no clue what we are saying. These moments are decreasing in frequency as our Arabic improves and the cultural divide between students and teacher lessens, but today's class included an especially bad bout of giggles for all of us.
The timing of this homesickness was perfect as I actually returned to the US today... sort of. For our weekly lecture, we visited the American embassy and attended what was essentially a recruiting session for the foreign service. I think for some people this was a little boring, since they aren't interested in the State Department at all, but for me it was good to hear the insights of these Americans working at an embassy in the Middle East. I even found out that one of the women grew up in the same area as I did and attended a high school where many of my friends went. The talk was helpful and exciting for me, even if it didn't have that much to do with our program itself. I thought that the only disappointing thing about the embassy visit was that we saw them setting up for their 4th of July celebration, but did not succeed in attaining an invite.
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