June 30, 2003

The views from our summer home in Abu Qash are incredible.

We caught the shared taxi towards the University today. Birzeit University was our home two years ago when we first studied Arabic formally. Now we've returned to do more study, this time digging into standard written Arabic. We've done well at colloquial, but remain close to illiterate when it comes to reading and writing.

Marthame took a placement test to see if he had picked up enough to get into level two - he did, much to his surprise (and to the teacher's). Elizabeth, meanwhile, is content to stick with level one. It would be nice to feel some mastery of the language for a while, as well as getting grounded in the foundations.

We had dinner in the village of Birzeit overlooking the town's main roundabout. We keep running into folks from Zababdeh that we know - they're everywhere!