Classical music and a dinner party

We just finished our first week of classes. The weekly schedule breaks down like this: we have four hours of class Sunday Wednesday and two hours on Thursday. Among them, we have 9 hours a week of 3ammiyya (spoken) and 7 hours of fuS7a (written), along with two hours of lit, in which we're reading a contemporary Syrian novel. Most Thursday afternoons, instead of class we will have conversation time or short trips to interesting sites around the city.

This past Thursday, however, we had the pleasure to get our AIDS and TB tests done. This meant a lot of bureaucracy, riding from one office to another, waiting around, and finally a small blood draw, which for me led to the predictable 15 minutes of fainting afterwards. All is well that ends well, though.

Thursday night, hoping to catch great cello music, me and friends head down to the Opera House only to buy tickets for what turned out to be a play :/ Luckily the tickets were only about $2 so we said screw it and went next door to the Higher Institute for Music for a classical guitar recital which was a blast.

Last night I decided that it would be fun to have a dinner party. This involved doing all the shopping for spices and everything in Arabic which was pretty exciting. Among the successes were managing to explain what cloves look like and then getting some cloves handed to me! Among the failures (maybe not a language-related one?) is that no one has ever heard of something like coconut milk here, but I'm sure it's out there somewhere, giving the sizable population of Malaysian (plus other) immigrants here.

No internet at home yet, which means no pictures for you all yet. Hope everyone is well in North America!