Sunday, August 6, 2017

Week 7: Winding down to the End of the summer program

Hello everyone! Well I can't believe I'm saying this but I'm already almost done with the summer! This upcoming week is our last week of classes complete with a final recording for our Moroccan Arabic class (~10 minutes covering 5 different cultural topics like souqs, clothing, music, etc.) and a final paper for Modern Standard Arabic (800-1000 words). The last week of the summer program involves final interviews, signing up for fall content courses and direct enrollment classes, and finalizing community service placements. I will most likely be volunteering at a local community center potentially teaching (hopefully not, I don't particularly want to work with kids but I'm always flexible). The director of the center knows some doctoral students in Linguistics who may want to do some sort of project with me so more details on that will follow as I get them.

This past week I finally joined a gym and its really invigorated my daily routine. The gym's not the fanciest in the world but it gets the job done. My main issue is the club also has group classes which would be fine but they blast odd remixes of Western techno and 80s music so regardless of what's in my headphones I get to listen to odd remixes of Western techno and 80s music. Additionally, there are no clips for the barbells to hold the weights but I haven't had any problems as of yet. At first the fact that everything was in kilograms threw me off but I got used to that fairly quickly. The last major issue is there are about 3 or 4 different styles of dumbbells and some styles have complete pairs and some don't so you have to mix and match but the more difficult part is you have to guess the weight cause only 1 or 2 of the styles are labelled. As much as I seem to be complaining about this place, its maybe a minute from my host family's place and its like 16 bucks a month. There are cheaper places but I'm paying for the convenience of a close place so I can't talk myself out of going (I went 4 days last week so I think it's working!).

That's all for now. As always questions, comments, and concerns are always welcome!

Johnny M.

2 comments:

  1. What's wrong with teaching? Lol!
    What kind of courses are you looking at for the fall?

    ReplyDelete
  2. So I'm curious: What type of group classes do they have at the gym? Men/Women/Co-ed?

    ReplyDelete