Back to School again

Yesterday I attended my first class "successfully" and today I had another class. I needed to take 2 major course and 1 minor course with one dissertatation. There are lots of choice in Middle Eastern Studies, for example: Middle East Politics, Middle East Society, Mordernization of Middle East, Arabic films and cinema, Israeli and Palestinian, Origin of Islam, Central Asia Politics... However the timetable of these courses often crash each other. Actually choices are limited.

At last, I chose these three courses: Modern Trend in Islam; Israeli, Palestinian and Arab World; Modernity and Transformation of Middle East from 1838 to 1958. However, I still haven't decided which should be my major.

It supposed that we can choose "Jihad, Al-Qaeda and Terrorists" this year, however the department head told us and joked, "that teacher is off this year, if you want to study this course, you can change from 1 year full time to 2 year half time and take it next year!"

This is really a disappointing fact. That course is on the list in school website, however no one informed us that was cancelled. If I come here for studying Jihad and Al-Qaeda, I must be pissed off.

Why I chose these 3? It seems Israeli and Palestinian problem is not extremely difficult for me to understand and I have some relevent background as I have been to both places.

Modernity of Middle East, because I have already studied the Chinese history and Meiji Restoration in Japan, but I don't know much about Middle East modernization. It will be interesting to know why modernization of Middle East is far lag behind Japan and even China although Middle East is the first part of Asia which was challenged by western world.

Whole Arabic culture and thinking is related closely with Islam. So study Islamic thought for me is a must, although it probably is the most difficult subject.

Except my regular class, I was also required to take in-session English writing course because my score of IELTS in writing is 6 (my average mark is 7.5. Comprehension 9, Listening 8.5, Oral 7). And I will probably audit some more classes for interest. For example, I probably will sit the class "politics and communication in Middle East", "Politics and government in Middle East", "African Movie" and "Modern Turkey". Anyway, it depends on how much time I have and my workload.

There are lots of Current Affairs seminar and Free-movie in this school. Every Monday evening, the Jewish studying centre will invite scholars to talk about Israel, today afternoon I watched a documentary which is about 2 Bangledesh girls in London, which was arranged marrige with the Bangledesh guys they don't know before.

Although London's studying cost is expensive, you can only experience the diversity of culture in this place.