What have I been doing?

"Šodienlielbritānijāprotestuspietrīspadsmitapcienājumuunpriekšsēdētājsnoplūktiemviņadeguna."

Question 1: Where did the protests take place and [WORD] their [WORD] dog kennel?"

"Danas je u Velikoj Britaniji protesta dovesti do trinaest ДнесвъвВеликобритания протестидоведедотринадесет. äta mina shorts och skal mina bananer och flubugate den wonderflonium."

Question 2: Where did the space ants get their bananas?

This is more or less how the listening portion of our final exam transpired today.

Rather than testing the ability to listen to our teacher, as we have been practicing diligently for 8 weeks, our listening test submitted us to a buzzing television broadcasting Al-Jazeera news that included lots of shouting (from this I determined there was a protest going on) and dubbed-over English. We were then to answer questions like those I wrote above, with equal comprehension of the quoted portions. I wasn't sure where one word in the broadcast ended and the other began - it was like those sped-up recordings of English that make the announcer sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks. I wasn't even sure the announcers were speaking Arabic.

Halfway through the exam, we determined that the announcer was indeed speaking fusHa Arabic - but using 3amiyya pronunciation. Hence, we weren't being tested on our ability to listen to the Arabic that we had practiced all summer long either.

By the end of this section, I cast my cares into the desert and circled answers that looked visually appealing.

The written exam that took place before this was a three-hour test of patience. The 20 of us who remain (for some have left the program early) were grouped in one classroom. Half used dictionaries, the other half wondered if they, too, were allowed to use dictionaries. The door squeaked open and slammed shut about once every 20 seconds...for three hours. With one hour remaining, our program director entered the classroom, walked up to the front and whispered and laughed with the woman proxying our exam. I, sitting in the front of the classroom, asked them to keep it down because we WERE STILL TAKING OUR EXAMS.

Then Al-Mudeera, the director of the language school, squeaked open the door. "Why haven't you finished the test yet?" she asked incredulously. "Because we still have a half-hour," I responded. "No, THAT'S for the listening section! You have three more minutes."

So I returned to the last page of questions:

"Based on the previous text, why was the [WORD] racist speech [WORD] killing at-human-like-[WORD] until stop for [WORD] space ants? President Obama."

Have...I really just spent the last eight weeks in Egypt studying this language?