I did a quick calculation last night, looks like I was right on the money with my budget. I estimated an approximate daily cost of 22.77 a day here. That includes rent, tuition, and around 800 riayls a day in spending money. If I stuck to that budget, I could stay here another 1.6 years… I might need it too, Arabic grammar is completely, totally kicking my ass. It’s bad enough trying to memorize all those new words, but the nouns are (usually) pronounced differently when in prepositional phrases, plurals take different form if they are the subject as opposed to the object of the sentence, when a sentence starts with a verb, that verb takes the singluar, masculine, third person form REGARDLESS of the gender or number of the subjects, it goes on and on… Each new rule is more bewildering that the last. I have to keep telling myself that of course this is hard, that’s why you have to go to Yemen to learn it… I’ll take it slow, although I doubt I could take living here another 1.6 years… Hmmm, maybe another year with a trip home to break it up a little, that’s a possibility..
Isaac