Postcard from Kuwait

Hello everyone,

Well, I have struggled to get to this point on the blog because all the text at the top comes up here in Arabic. Now that is a new challenge for me! Harder than Google in Kiswahili! Sometimes it is good to have your taken-for-granted props taken from under you - anyone got experience of this? Of course you have - we have a rich linguistic diversity in this group - many of you must have found yourself linguisitically disabled in certain situations - when this happens, is it merely a hindrance to knowledge acquisition, or can we learn something from it? Emirates tries to sooth any discomfort by announcing even before takeoff the list of languages that its cabin staff can cope with. Is this good for us? What do you think?

I would like to add that I thought the last weekend was very successful in many ways, although there are quite a number of loose ends that need to be cleared up - deliberately so, because such an event needs class time (or blog time) to tie up the issues we touched on. In the mean time, keep the contributions coming - particularly the other groups who haven't posted on the Sunday morning activity.

What's that I hear on the west breeze? "What am I doing here?" More soon...