Wheat Harvests: The Move

For those of you who have not heard, we just recently moved. We were living in a small town/city of about 100,000 people in the South of our current country. A little over a week ago, we moved up to a big city (almost 3 million people). The main reason for our move was language. For the past year we have been studying Arabic with tutors who may or may not be reliable to show up and who may or may not be well educated in Arabic themselves. Because of these and a few other reasons, our Arabic was just not progressing as it should be, so we made the decision to move to the big city where we will now be able to attend an actual language school. Our hopes are high that our Arabic will get a jump-start and we will be able to quickly progress. Our language school doesn't begin their new semester till the end of January, so in the meantime, we are getting some tutoring from a tutoring center in hopes of bringing our grammar skills up so we will be able to test into the next semester at the language school.

The move and transition to the big city was fairly smooth. We got settled in and unpacked fairly quickly. We are still getting to know our neighborhood. We are not used to having everything we need right outside our door, and we are also not used to taxi rides taking thirty minutes or more (did I fail to mention that it is also extremely cold here right now). Even though we have just moved cities, it feels like we have moved to a different country in a way. I (Sarah) have a lot more freedom and independence in the big city than I did in our small one. Because it is a big city, there is a lot more western influence and sometimes I feel like I am actually in Europe or the States. I just recently read that our city is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, and sometimes looking out our window at the buildings surrounding us, I can see that it is true.