Today was just another day closer to the weekend! Had a relatively uneventful Arabic class since our midterm is tomorrow. However, my amazing, motherly teacher, Imam, brought in a fruit cake type thing for Gurees’s birthday! It was so sweet of her and nice to have an interruption in the two hour long class! I was so excited to have cherries and kiwis and peaches—all the great things covered in sugar and on top!

After spending the entire morning (ten til noon) outside studying for poli sci (it was only like 90 degrees today and it was beautiful to go all day and not break a sweat like I normally do just walking to class!), I grabbed lunch after Arabic and crammed for my second midterm today. I was totally nervous because I know so much on the Arab-Israeli conflict but so little on the Syrian-Lebanese conflict—which he barely covered and we had no formal coursepack on the subject. However, when we got the exam I was relieved! It was not a ridiculous lose-lose situation question like the last exam on Iraq! The question was name two of the reasons that the conflict has yet to be solved! One was super easy: domestic politics, domestic politics! The second one I had to search a multitude of other smaller reasons an decided to go on the safe and moderate side (to try to get an A instead of graded down for my opinion!) and talked about international involvement—from lack of involvement in Europe and from America’s very recent acknowledgement of a two-state solution under Bush. Hopefully I can get a good grade and still uphold my values!

Tonight I just finished preparing an Arabic presentation for class tomorrow. Soon I need to work on vocabulary because the second part of our midterm is a listening activity! I’ll have all morning to study as well because even though I slept a lot last night I’m tired!

On a random note my teacher for poli sci was so funny today in the midst of us talking about a difficult issue. He was like “let me bring some light to this issue.” “Why would someone want to leave the U.S. or Europe or civilization to come to the mess we call the Middle East. . .Devotion to Jerusalem? Then visit and go back home to civilization!” It sounds semi-awful to put the situation it that light, but trust me an old Palestinian teacher in Egypt joking about how ppl should not want to live in the Middle East was funny on exam day!

Off to solve some MFCR BS (it never ends because people never do their work and are all too "ambitious") then to study Arabic.