7/10 Never Pinky-Swear

Normal day in class, except that Hanan told us she’s getting married August 9^th. She invited us all if we happened to still be here, but sadly we will all be gone. Her fiancé is an officer in the police, so the conversation actually matched perfectly with today’s vocab. As much as I don’t like how the book is set up, I’ve actually had to use several vocabulary words (like “in reality…”) the day after we get to them.

Afternoon lecture was in Arabic again today, but I really feel I comprehended most all of it – as it was a cooking lesson. Douha, the lady who set us up with our homestay families made Couscous in front of us, showing us how a little water (and salt) are added to the flour to get the grains, and slightly more water is added to the dried grains and its put in a pot over meat, onions, lentels, oils and spices in water. The meat is cooked in this broth, and its steam is used to cook the couscous (two times for 7-10 min. each time). I couldn’t really write up a recipe, as she basically just eyeballed everything. She then topped it off with onions, cinnamon, and raisins, caramelized with honey (YESH!) and we got to taste test her lesson. Amazing! Also, while we waited for it to cook, we took flour mixed with enough water to make a dough ball. After kneading the dough, we put oil on our hands and table, and popped off little dough balls. We each kneaded the balls, and flattened them into flat circles, which we then folded into thirds first vertically, then horizontally. The end flattened layered-square was then cooked over oil to make an amazing fried bread snack, perfect with honey.

Surfing sucked today. The waves were less than existent. I grabbed a long board for this second to last time, so I was able to get up way easier than the shortboard I had been practicing on. Feeling confident I starting learning how to turn. Apparently, as your feet are straddling the middle balance points, to turn you just move your weight to turn either toe side or heel side. When turning toe side, the weight shifts to the balls of your feet, and your heels rise, and vice versa. Other than that it just takes practice to learn the limits of your board. One of the girls took a shortboard thinking the waves couldn’t possibly be as bad as everyone was saying, and as a result she was having a repulsively bland time. I switched boards with her for the rest of the day, and I even managed to get up on a couple waves with the short one, though it was considerably harder if not impossible for some sized waves. Tired of waiting forever for the big waves to come, I talked to Shafi and told him I would practice paddling, though not too far. Julia came with me, but when we left everyone followed our wake. We didn’t go as far as before, and stopped maybe half the distance to set up “camp” and play games. We got on our boards and tried running over everyone elses board, as well as stood up to do backflips and the like. Because our time was cut short yesterday, Shafi let us stay two hours with change today. Too bad it was two hours + of flat water. Our group was joined by two others, who are studying Arabic and working at a summer camp for kids. The one from London, Nadia, is pre-med, and told me of how the process works over there (BMAT, which isn’t as big as the MCAT, and admissions mainly based on interviews, bigger than the US).

After showers back at the surfshop, the core group chilled at the café above the club, while we sipped on juice to a setting sun. Absolute beauty, unadulterated peace. The kid of one of the workers was playing with us, and we had a great time, though he was rather persistent with the girls, which he obviously had a 10 year-old’s crush on. Side note, pinky swearing here, actually is sign language for “It’s on,” and will start a conflict, while the same action with your thumb actually means truce (“Ca fit”). We also found out that this kid was the reason we didn’t go to “Hawaii”, as he slashed the tires of Ocean’s van. I thought it was just a kid acting out, but when asked Lemetha [why] he motioned us that he punctured the tire to breath in the compressed air – aka, he huffed it to get high. I was reminded that it’s been a while since I’ve seen kids sniffing glue here, but here was a reminder how sad a reality the drug prevalence is.