January 17, 2008

It doesn't feel like January outside. It feels like late May. Oh well, at least it stopped raining for the year. Yes, it rained for about 1 week. It was cold and windy and if anyone had told me to bring warm clothes because you are going to need them in the dessert, I would have laughed.

Ok, so I titled this blog lecturing. after being in the country for about 2 weeks I taught my first lecture class. I am filling in for a proffessor until he gets back and so on week 2 of work I was teaching class. I think it went pretty well. I could have done better, but overall it wasn't bad. I wasn't able to get nearly as far as I wanted to get this time, but doesn't that always happen? When I was talking to Mom a couple days ago she pointed out that no community college wanted to give me a chance teaching lecture and here I got the chance in the first 2 weeks. Granted, this isn't my own class, I won't have it for the entire semester but it is a start. Hopefully, if I stay here long enough, they will give me my own class so I can get some experience.

This summer they are talking about offering second semester general chemistry class. I would love to teach the lecture, but I don't think that will happen. I'll teach the lab though. It will be an 8 week course so that might mean I will have to adjust my summer travel plans.

Anyway, everything is going fine here so far. I went grocery shopping last night and that took a long time. First you have to find where the item is located and then find out what brands are available. If there aren't any familar brands then you start looking arround the packaged, i.e. the Arabic script, to find out what it is. For example, when buying milk you have to look at the color of cap, this tells you whole, 2%, or skim, and you must look at the label. If the label says fresh leban, put it back and look for fresh milk. Leban, as I have told, is camel's milk. Anyway, doing that over and over, it took me 1.5 hours to get groceries. Crazy. I got more of the really good flat bread. So good.