Author: Nikki

Berlin Honors: assignment – reading reflection, week 1

Reflections on Chapter 1, Age of Migration I just took the course “Migration, Displacement, and Return” last quarter, so many of the topics and points brought up in that class are coming back to me for this reading. We had begun with the UNHCR 1951 Refugee Convention (which can be found here) and was worth reading […]

personal identity reflection – Berlin Honors Week 1 assignment

I am a “nontraditional” (older, return) student and an only child who grew up in very Rural Pennsylvania, surrounded by farmland and forest. The last house I lived in (with my parents) was surrounded by 10 acres of land, most of which was cornfield! I remember always feeling very antsy and anxious to leave. I got […]

Ich bin zzzzzzz….

I had been immersing myself pretty hard into German last Summer and had planned to keep going. But then I made a fairly spontaneous (and pretty fortuitous)  decision to jump into Arabic for my language requirement at UW. I’ll need two years of it to fulfill my departmental honors requirement. I wanted something new, obviously, instead […]

!لحَمْد لله‎‎ا

لحَمْد لله‎‎ا means “Alhamdulillah!” which literally means “praise God!” “God” figures quite largely within the Arabic language, but I (and many Arabic speakers) are atheists so in that case it’s an exclamation of joy, for example: I’m feeling better – Alhamdulillah! The bus showed up on time – Alhamdulillah! I found some chocolate in the cabinet – Alhamdulillah! Or, […]

الموسيقى العربية

These past couple weeks I’m consciously realizing that I need to begin to immerse in the Arabic language. As I’ve had to choose classes for the Winter quarter, I’ve decided that this class (Arabic) is the most important one and the one I need to invest the most in. (Since I’m hoping these two years of […]