I’ve been talking a lot about how it’s weird that we’re almost at the end of our trip, but today it went beyond words and genuinely felt like it was all coming too fast. We’ve said goodbye to our lovely afternoon teacher, booked the minibus to the airport, and even started thinking about packing. I know, organised right?
Looking back over the trip, I wonder what I’ve learned. It would be tempting to think that because I’m not fluent yet I have therefore learned nothing. But there are a few indications that that’s not quite true. Firstly, I passed the midterm! Woo! But that’s not the real expression of how much we’ve got out of the trip. It’s more easily readable in the fact that we understood most of our taxi-driver’s monologue on the way home from school today, and the fact that I dreamed in Arabic last night, or that when the heroine of this evening’s film walked into someone, in my head I said “asifa!” (I’m sorry). It’s more the fact that we can communicate better now than we did at the start, and that we can survive in the language outside of the four walls of Fulton 113. And that has definitely made it worth it.
Other than that, there really isn’t that much to say. We went out after dark for some food and we were neither killed nor maimed on the walk home, we made tomato and chickpea Moroccan soup in our final cooking club, and our sunburn is almost faded (although when someone suggested going to the beach earlier we all winced). But overall, we’re tired but happy, and preparing for the long journey back home, to a place where we can’t drop random Arabic words into our sentences at will. That will be so odd after all this time!
Anyway, off to sleep in time for our final full day. Wow what a thought! Stay tuned in for a more interesting last leg of our brilliant journey!

Hannah

About Aimee Hannah Mccallum

I am a final year BA International Relations student at Sussex University, and I'm also studying the Arabic Language Elective Pathway. Alongside this, I am acting as a Student Language Ambassador, in hopes of convincing the world that a language is a beautiful thing :)