There is one benefit of living in the DC area…

    Rick has been buying things from a vendor outside of
his building for years. He’s an Egyptian and Rick mentioned to him that
I am going to Cairo next year. Well, that got him all excited and by
the time he was done, he had promised Rick that I could call his
brother in Cairo, would have some books for me to read, and who knows
what else. That’s pretty exciting, maybe I should talk to this guy:-)
Where else in the US could this have happened? Anyway, if I play my
cards right, I hope I can score a ride from the airport in cairo,
that’s actually my biggest worry right now.
    I’ve started to look at some beginning Arabic books.
The ones that look the most useful to me are the conversational ones.
The textbooks don’t look as though they’ll help much outside of a
classroom. I think I’ll start with “Your first 100 words in Arabic” or
something like that so that I can get used to hearing, speaking, and
writing simple things. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to reading from
right to left….

Isaac