Saba Imtiaz's Blog, page 4
August 30, 2016
In Sugar They Trust: Scenes from my local Dunkin Donuts
I've spent a lot of time at my local Dunkin Donuts over the past few months. It's open early and closes late, it's cheaper than other coffee shops in the neighbourhood, and you don't have to stand around someone's table and talk loudly about how some people just won't clear out even when they've paid the bill to get a seat.
Even though I spent a lot of time at Dunkin in the past, I'd kind of forgotten how nice it can be to just sit there. A few months ago I was between appointments on Shahrah-...
Amman in the Archives
Photo by Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images News / Getty Images
One of my favourite things to do is look at newspaper archives online for coverage of cities. It’s always interesting to see the evergreen stories (or what I'd like to call 'what not to pitch'), the facts that are always mentioned, almost in a boilerplate fashion, but also the tone that ranges from the Orientalist to a genuine sense of discovery.
Here’s Amman, Jordan in the Google newspaper archives
This reads like the opening scene of a...
August 25, 2016
The bilingual switchover
It’s easy to take being bilingual for granted, particularly when you’re studying a language with the same script. I don’t think I’d ever really thought properly before about how your brain switches over into a different language before I started learning Persian a couple of years ago. I’d start replacing “gaps” in my sentences with the language that seemed closest – in my case, Urdu. I did this with Arabic when I lived in Jordan as well, though that was out of sheer necessity since I wasn’t l...
August 23, 2016
Summer 2016: The one with all the Arabic.
Instagram photo by Saba * Jun 10, 2016 at 10:18pm UTC
Theoretically, I knew what I was signing up for. The Middlebury Language School's immersive program means two months of sole instruction in the Arabic language, pledging to only communicate in Arabic, hours of work. So I took lessons on italki for a few months to prep, then switched my phone to Arabic, set up an auto-reply message asking people to only correspond in Arabic, and took a flight to California. (Middlebury's Arabic School is...
