"Oh, God, look on the internet... there are absolutely thousands of blogs" replied my Arabic teacher, rolling her eyes and looking somewhat exasperated at having been reminded of the thousands of pages of Google results which the computer spews forth, turning her once organised desktop into a landfill site, every time she searches, on behalf of her students, those three little words - 'living in damascus'.
Yet the Oxford approach to the ominously titled 'year abroad', especially for the quirkier languages (Arabic being one of them), seems to differ somewhat from those experiences which have been so helpfully chronicled in the blogosphere.
It is this 'drop them in at the deep-end and see who can swim' attitude which I hope to capture, in all it's watery glory, if not for the benefit of some poor soul in the next century suffering under similar circumstances, then for my own, so that I can come back at the end of my time and see how far I've come.
Assuming I've not drowned, that is.
