Catching Up On Blog Posts...Wie Immer

But this time I mean it. There's so much to say and so little time but I am pledging to make a commitment to write here more often. I will get to my Wegberg trip (to see my friends and host family from my exchange program in high school) but for now I am going to write a bit about the Uni and my classes over here because that is after all why I am here (or perhaps Biergärten? haha, no that's not completely true). My two classes at the LMU are actually on the Englischer Garten, a beautiful park that spans from the northern part of the city (where I live in Studentenstadt) all the way to Marienplatz (where the famous Rathaus stands). My first class on Tuesday, "Transnational Networks and the Dynamics of Conflict Resolution", taught in English by a Greek professor, is one of the most interesting classes I have ever taken. It deals with illigitamate actors who get in the way of peace agreements and stall them for their own advantage (spoilers) and new states (countries) that have formed within recognized countries. A lot of the stuff we talk about is on the cutting-edge of the field that not a lot of people have written about. We also talk about criminal and terrorist networks and how they carry their operations underground. I have never studied anything about the topics brought up in the course so it's all fascinating. The other course is "Der politische Islam in Internationale Beziehungen" (The political islam in IR). It is in German but all of the texts are in Englisch except a few. It is challenging to translate the texts in my head into German, especially talking about IR theory in German but it is a good challenge and the professor is really accomadating. Well that is it for classes at the University. Other than my German class, I am taking a Modern German Literature class, in which we read a lot of modern poems and discuss them. My professor is an older gentleman with a white mustasche, who is a very traditional German professor and loves talking about poetry! He gets really into the poems that we discuss and makes the class interesting. Herr Kunisch types up class papers on his typewriter and then makes copies of them for us. It is refreshing to have a traditional, "old-school" professor for a change. And that is about it on the academic side (excluding German of course).

Next up: Wegberg!