Some Background

My name is Michael Scott, and I'm a college student and an Army ROTC cadet. I was recently accepted as a recipient of the Department of State's Critical Language Scholarship to study Arabic in Alexandria, Egypt. So, naturally, I decided to keep a blog of my travels with plenty of pictures, anecdotes, and Arabic.

I've taken four semesters of Arabic, two of which were in a DOD intensive language program. I'm currently considered Level 2 - Limited Working Proficiency on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale, so not so great. Hopefully by the end of the program I will be near level 3 and will be writing a few of these entries in Arabic :-).

This is pretty much just an introduction. I probably won't post much until I get closer to leaving. The program is from 31 May to 1 August. I leave for a briefing in DC on 13 June. So... more to come; until then...

!أهلا و سهلا