The Kebab-Grinder

First day of class was today. With a year of Arabic under my belt from university I thought I was fairly prepared; true, it's been about two years since the last class but I still studied the book and stumbled over reading Cairene newspapers. I was rusty, sure, but not too bad.
Four straight hours of class, from 9-1, cured me of that illusion more than Dirty Harry cured punks of the notion that they were feeling lucky. The president of the university popped into the first few minutes of class, explaining that for every English word used in class, you're fined, and at the end of the term you pay up. He also jokingly added, 'For those of you with a very small number, low amount of fine, we will take you out to a nice Yemeni restaurant. For those of you with a high number, we'll point you in the direction of the Sheraton'. And from then on it was an Arabic barrage; my class (there are 3 others with me) is at a lower level of proficiency, so when we don't know a word, the teacher can't give us an Arabic definition because of our limited vocabulary, which makes miming things like 'driving' easy while making 'color', 'tense', and 'predicate' slightly more difficult.
We then headed as a group out to lunch. We sat down at the table and people immediately started bringing us food; Yemenis don't do menus (many are illiterate and, anyway, they don't understand why someone wouldn't already know what they want), so we ended up with sheets of thin bread (like naan) and bowls of boiling meat to dip it in until we finally told them khas, enough. The Yemeni exchange rate is extremely favorable (250 riyals to the dollar) and the country so poor (163rd in GDP per capita) that it's possible to get by on $5 a day and live comfortably for a few dollars extra. I went to the ATM to take out some cash to last me a while and ended up with a half-inch thick wad of thousand-riyal bills; I felt like I was in a Jay-Z video.
We went further into the city today, hitting up a supermarket where I bought what I'm pretty sure is laundry detergent and a box of Earl Grey, though I doubt the tea's origins: it reads, 'Ahmad Tea, made in London' but the rest of the box is in Cyrillic - none of those things is like the other - so, like most things in the Yemeni shops, I have no idea where it came from.
On the way back we stopped at a juice shop across from the parliament building (I'd take a picture but it's illegal to take photos of police stations, government buildings... basically anything with a soldier outside)
And now, it's on to do some homework and go through the book I was handed in class (when our first teacher - we have one 9-11 and then his wife 11-1 - gave us our assignments for tonight he told us to just 'read the whole thing'... awesome). We've already had a blackout this afternoon so, insha'allah (god willing) we've meet our daily quota.