First week over

First week over. A great time but hard work! The course is a foundation course and so having studies IR before I have a good understanding of the things we are covering from LSE. There is still a lot of reading to be done - about 60 pages a day - but some of it is familar. The real difference though is the class discussions and it is really true when you are told you learn the most from you classmates. With quite a good global spread in my group we are having some great examples drawn from Africa and Latin America which are totally new for me so something to go home and look at online for the next day!



Friday was a time for celebration and most people hit the bars in town straight after class. I actually went to San Jose to accompany a friend and go so drenched by the rain the umbrella was useless... the rain was seriously splashing back up to chest hight and the roads flooded everywhere so in about two minutes of the deluge starting water was over my trainers. At that point I just gave up trying to keep dry! Ended up going out to a club on in the evening until the early hours and the one lesson I learnt on Satuday was not to drink tequilla again in a hurry becuase I felt rought all day. My hosts had even cooked a typical Costa Rican poormans soup for lunch which I enjoyed but not as much as I would have done without the hangover.



Bad news is the road has not yet been fixed but I have seen some photos and work is progressing (it looks like a mud pit now rather than a road). Someone scanned the photo from the national newspaper which was taken on the day of the road slide so I'll post that up here.



First assignment - a conflict mapping exercise - is due on Wednesday so I have been working on that today and chosen to look at border disputed between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.