Innsbruck, Austria- August 6, 2004
Its Friday and we just finished our first week of classes. I should also add my roommate is from Ghana. We share a small room. Its basically small quarters with two beds and two desks. It works fine as the program is basically finished in 7 weeks from today. Some good news about the program is that every second weekend, we will have a 4-day weekend from actual classes to work on assigned papers that we need to write and research and so on.
Another nice thing about this place is they provide us with about 10 computers upstairs in the computer room. An additional nice thing is the swimming pool as well as a large courtyard area where we were playing frisbee and just socialize and such. Earlier this week, they had a special orientation celebration of some sort. Basically it meant prominent people in Austria who allowed this program to happen, as well as some firegirls afterwards who put on an artistic fire show after the sun set. Basically it involved them dancing and swinging large items that were lit on fire into the air and such. Interesting and a good time. Our group is very social, and all is good there.
The first day of classes were basically an introduction to the course as well as a tour of the city and our buildings and such. The next couple days were an introduction to the field of peace and conflict studies and leaders in the field and such. People like Johan Galtung and such. But actually our professor took us much further into more or less what I perceived as Eurocentric history. It was interesting nontheless, as kind of a brush up on European history. They did add Ghandi and summed up the rest of the non-European world into the religions of Buddhism and Hinduism (much to the dismay of the Islamic students who were completely unrecognized. Other than that, it was interesting. But having spent a lot of time in Asia, I did hope and wish it did encounter that world to some extent as well. But interesting nontheless.
On Thursday we had a class on Security from a Peace Studies expert. It was interesting as well, but he was complaining about why are so many things off limits and just chalked up to security as the answer why you can't go just anywhere you want. The guy was Austrian though, so in the Austrian context it makes a lot of sense. Talking to a few Colombians and such, security if it existed, would offer freedom, not taking it away. So once again it was kind of Eurocentric in the sense that security is in inconvenience in a safe and secure Europe, particularly Austria. Still interesting nontheless, and the speaker was an excellent speaker, very articulate, and very convincing if his argument even though I disagreed on some of the basic principles of it.
Friday, we touched into international law, which was a very interesting topic for me. Something I think I might do a thesis paper on or at the minimum, study much more extensively. Oh, I should also add we had another peace expert from Britian who now lives in New York. He spoke during one of the introduction courses, and was an excellent speaker as well. Its almost unfortunate as many of the students had so many what I perceived as mundane questions, that we couldn't get the entire lecture that he had originally intended to give due to lack of time. All in all, very good here however.
Next Journal Entry in Austria:
August 11, 2004
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Wintermoon2@yahoo.com