Week 14 of my Study Abroad Experience in Haifa, Israel

Hello everyone, I hope you all enjoyed the holidays this week and spent quality time with your family and friends. For Christmas Eve, I was invited by Lubna, one of my internship supervisors to have dinner with her family at her house. This was such a great experience and she and her family showed me so much kindness. The food was the best that I have had during my time in Israel. They prepared Arabic Salads and many other dishes but my favorite food of all was the fresh Kebabs. It was so kind of Lubna to show me such compassion and I am extremely grateful for it.

During Christmas day, I traveled with my friends Loren, Eden, and Eliav to Nazareth to see the gigantic Christmas tree they had in the center of the city. We also ate an excellent Middle Eastern restaurant and I tried tabbouleh for the first time. Tabbouleh is definitely one of my favorite foods now and I recommend that you try it if you get the opportunity. Even though I was not able to spend the holidays with my family, I am grateful to celebrate it with the wonderful people I have met here.

Additionally, this week I had my final presentation for my spoken Arabic class in the Palestinian dialect and I received an A. I was happy about this because now I will be ending this class with an A for the semester. I have 2 weeks left in the semester and I have a lot of work to complete before the semester comes to an end. For my internship and Terrorism and Responses classes, I must write a 10-page final for both but I am confident that I will do well on them. Moreover, this week I was able to pre-register for my classes for the spring semester. As of right now, I am interested in taking Islamic Fundamentalism in the Arab World, Syria: History, Politics and Society, Cyberspace, Terrorism and Counterterrorism and continuing my Arabic language classes.

My next couple of weeks will be very busy because of school but I look forward to all that I am going to learn. I have been feeling a little anxious because I am supposed to find out soon if I will make it past the first round for the Critical Language Scholarship application process. The acceptance rate for this program is under 10% and I hope that I can become a part of their 2020 summer cohort in Jordan. This program will allow me to build upon the Arabic language skills that I developed in Israel. I would like to thank everyone for reading this week and I wish you all a successful new year!