Cats Cats Everywhere

One of the most heartbreaking things for me so far has been seeing all of the feral cats in Jordan. There aren't really dogs here- I've heard one or two barking, but mostly it's just lots and lots of street cats. There's an empty lot across from my apartment building where the dumpsters are located that is a hotspot for kitties, so I see a lot of them going through. It's been really hard to resist the urge to adopt all of them and bring them into the apartment, but that would be rather irresponsible of me, and I'm sure my roommates wouldn't be too keen on ten new members of the family. Since I can't magically give them all homes, I decided to leave water out for them so that they have a clean source of water. I initially bought a small plastic bowl to leave water out in, but that vanished mysteriously in the night, so I'm going to start collecting large bottles and cutting off the bottoms to use as bowls. Hopefully nobody will scavenge those up.

Classes started yesterday, and I placed into Intermediate II! Initially I thought that I would (hopefully) place into Intermediate I, seeing as I've taken a year of Arabic and should be starting first semester of second year. But second semester of Intermediate here lines up better with the Arabic program back home, so it's actually really great that I placed into there. Now if only I could convince the second year professor back at UW to keep a spot open for me when I return. That would be helpful. It's not very comforting to hear "You can take the placement test when you get back, but the class is full so I doubt you'll be able to get a spot"... but it's not really an option to not continue through, so I'll just put up a huge fuss if they don't let me back in.

So far class has been wonderful- right now we're just reviewing (which is very necessary given my summer off) but Ustaadha Ibtisam talks to us pretty much exclusively in Arabic, so I'm forced to really pay attention and figure out what is being said. I haven't had my area studies classes yet- those are later this afternoon- but I expect those to both be really interesting. If not, I have another week for the add/drop period to decide. I also have my first colloquial class tomorrow, which will be crazy. Since it's not really a written language, it'll probably be difficult to take notes in that class. But golly, I will try!