Who Needs Subtitles?

She's got a lot of things to carry. Me, I struggle trying to carry 4 bags on each arm until the blood stops circulating to my hands and I have to put things down for a minute. Ladies here just stack it on their head, tie their baby to their back (this lady doesn't have a baby, but just about everyone else I know does), then picks up a bag in one hand and grabs another kid's hand in her other and heads off down the road.

Some friends and I have started watching Season 6 of 24 but we have a little bit of a problem. The bad guys speak a lot of Arabic, which would normally be translated into English at the bottom of the screen except that since my friends bought the season in Jordan where they already speak Arabic they didn't translate the Arabic into English subtitles!!

You would think that would be no problem, seeing as how I've been studying Arabic for 2 years now, but somehow it still is. Maybe because I speak a certain dialect of Arabic that is not the dialect the bad guys are speaking or maybe because the bad guys are talking in code...or maybe I'm just making excuses for my pitiful attempts at Arabic!

So when the bad guys say something we have to pause and have a small discussion to try to determine what was actually said. It usually goes something like this: 'hmmm...I understood 5. There are 5 something's. I think that means visits...or visitors or something to do with a visit. (another) In Jordan that means cars...I think. (me) But it also kind of sounds like this other word that doesn't mean visitors but I don't remember what it does mean, I should know this, I just learned that word...'

We don't usually come to a consensus and have to wait an hour or two before what was said in Arabic actually gets said in English on the show. Then we feel stupid for not having figured it out in the first place.

And it's that time of year again...You can't really see the guys on the soccer field who, apparently, didn't get the notice that a dust storm was coming. You also can't see the plane that was landing at the airport in the middle of the storm, don't think he got the notice either. This one wasn't that bad but there are more coming, there always are.