Ants under the road

Road still washed out up to UPEACE but did see some pictures in the national newspaper and also form another student. Looks like they are trying to repair it as fast as possible but will take at least a week. The mayor got up at the welcome party at the end of the induction week and said that the engineers had decided it was ancient ants nests under the road which weakened it and made the hillside underneath collape and I guess that is something you would not be making up so it must be true! So today we were all bussed to another univeristy in San Jose to have our first day of lectures and classes. Everyone is doing the same introduction course in 'Foundation in Peace and Conflict Studies'. This is not something I have studied before but some of the names and materials are familiar from LSE just looking at things from a different prespective. The course outline looks really interesting and we have 15 days of teaching with a 75 minute lecture each day and a same lengh class afterwards and between 40 and 100 pages of reading to do each day for the next day so quite intense considering on top of that there will be an essay, presentation and a conflict map to produce all by the end of the course. The class today was a lot more participatory than I expected which I enjoyed and I get the feeling that common to all classes so it really will make for a challenging and interesing time.

The weekend was fun. On Saturday night I went down into town about 5ish becuase Fernando and Ingrid were heading out so I caught a lift. I went round to my friends house where there are 4 people staying but noone was in and it was raining a lot. So I went to the house of another guy I know who was also not it which exhaused all my options (I have friends I just don't know where they live yet!). I was going to head for a bar to see if there was anyone around but then I thought I would try the supermarket instead. Luckily there was a girl I recognised in the supermarket and so I said I had come into town for the evening but was not having much luck in finding people. So she invited me back to her place which was a real treck out into the countryside and down a huge hill. It was raining and dark so the bueaty of my jungle trek was lost but I will go back becuase she said it was stunning. Arrived at her house which really is in the jungle and found myself in chrage of killing the scorpion which had moved into her room while she was away. It made me feel a bit better about randomly going back to hers havin met her in the supermarket so I stayed for a drink with her and her housemate and then headed back into town by which time the friends I had come to see were back and we knocked together a real feast ussing everyones leftovers. The lesson I learnt form this is to ring before you go visiting people to check they are in!