See, I'm trying to catch the phonetics of it--the sound the announcer is producing is somewhere between toob and toop. I really need some people who have spent a lot of time in Arabic speaking countries to watch it, because seriously 25% of what is spoken is in English, and I don't know if that's normal or a function of the show's judges/setting in Dubai or what.

I did buy, but they didn't give us a choice. And the regalia's made out of really cheap material--I'm probably going to get a real cloth version when I get a job. Actually, my mom has her real cloth baccalaureate robe from the 70s, which I may get altered to be a doctoral robe, because, you know, family heirloom and all that.

VELVET. Does DOU have interesting regalia at all? I was super super jealous of a friend from CUNY--her robes were so much prettier.