Today, I woke up early to go to campus to return some books to the library and fix a problem with my Arabic class. With both of those taken care of I then grabbed a bus back home and passed out since I barely got any sleep last night or the night before. When I woke up, I took care of some work for the conference I'm organizing for this summer. Keeping straight the information of over 50 different academics is not as easy as one might think.
Then it was off to Arabic. Orr and I are in the same class so we've been studying together. The class focuses on translation so we work with short stories and some articles from al-Jazeera. It's pretty cool, but tough. Very different from an Arabic class in the States. Also, since we're studying in Hebrew, I'm not just learning new words in Arabic.
We went over the longest story today. It's called "Muhammad and the Spider." In the story, Muhammad and Abu Bakr are fleeing from the Meccan pagans who are trying to kill them. The two hide in a cave but are worried they will be found. But when the Meccans come, they see the opening of the cave is covered in spiderwebs. They knew they were close behind Muhammad and Abu Bakr so there wasn't enough time for the spiders to weave webs over the entrance to the cave. They give up and look elsewhere; they are saved by this miracle.
Cool story. But I can't help but thinking it sounds incredibly like the story of King David when he was fleeing from Saul. He also hid in a cave whose entrance was subsequently covered in spiderwebs, which saved him. This of course doesn't mean that it didn't happen to Muhammad as well, if anything it shows the strong parallels between the histories of Judaism and Islam.
While we were studying, all of a sudden, Hannah walked in. Apparently the new group of Overseas Students were taking their tour of the Negev and stopped by the village to check it out, like we did last summer. Na'ama was giving them the tour and I tagged along and translated for her. But then it was back to studying.
I've been trying to teach Shoko to lay down this week. He's getting the hang of it. Now I just need him to learn to do it when I say it and not just from the hand signals.
The other night, someone brought their dog to the village and Shoko brought him home for a while. It was going great until the other dog started to eat some of Shoko's food. Shoko wasn't happy when I put the other dog outside so we could go to bed.
Shoko always does this when playing with other dogs. It's like he's peaking over them.
These two are of Shoko trying to steal the spotlight and keep the other dog out of the picture.
Shoko got distracted by food, but still managed to keep his tail in the picture.
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