Qatar Study Tour Day 5

Hello Readers!
Today was an incredible day filled with many interesting visits and places. Our day started out fairly normal; we woke up early, at around 5:30, to go to school by bus. The bus rides are very different than in America, one is jostled around as the bus hits curbs and suddenly brakes often, and all of this is without seatbelts. 
When we got to school today, we went to class for about one and a half periods. My first period today was geography, which is essentially the same as history in the US. I found the teacher’s method of teaching particularly interesting. For example, he gave us a story that started like this; 
“ There are three hunters that are trying to hunt a zebra before the spoken language was created, they still only had symbols and hand motions. One of the hunters went off on his own instead, and ended up not being able to see the symbols. When they are hunting the creature, the spoken language was created” then he asks “In what situation was the spoken language created?” 
This question stored a plethora of answers, from the hunter that went off on his own screaming because of human instinct to the humans trying to imitate the zebra they were hunting by making similar noises, thus beginning the creation of a spoken language. All of these different opinions of course stirred many different debates about which of the answer was right. The lesson ended with him proving the point that before written language, there is no history. 
After the intriguing geography (or history) lesson, we took another ride in the school bus to Education City. This is a place with sister campuses of some prestigious schools, not just in America, but also international countries like England. The two colleges we visited were Georgetown University in Qatar and Northwestern University in Qatar. We visited the Georgetown campus first (first picture). Each college in education has an assortment of majors one can do under certain topics. For Georgetown, they focused mostly on Foreign policy, the specific majors being international politics, international economics, culture and politics, and international history, the most popular being international politics. The person presenting the school to us then explained what each major is about, the learning environment for this college, and application information. 
After we heard about all of the Campus, one of the third year students gave us a tour of the campus, which was beautiful. For example in the atrium (shown in picture one), there is one flag for every present nationality at the school, which I found very inspiring and unifying with the symbolism I pulled from being the fact that all of the flags were on one wall. We were also shown what a typical classroom and lecture hall would look like, with our tour ending at the gift shop where some people bought souvenirs. 
Next, we walked a short distance to the next campus; Northwestern University. We observed that the building was designed with more modern architecture as we walked in and headed to a conference room to discuss the university (picture 2). We learned that it has two main majors; communication and journalism, and that they will accommodate for any financial needs necessary, which many found to be a huge advantage of going. 
After the (slightly shorter) pitch for the university, we got a bit of hands on experience in an actual news room (picture 3), where two people were reporting, two were interviewing, one was a guest, and one was the weather. We did a mini news segment that was very fun to watch being filmed. The equipment that they use is state-of-the -art and very advanced, not unlike those used by professional news agencies. After this we got a tour of the campus, which included three rooms for filming with huge green screens, so big that one feels like they are falling into if they stare at it for too long. After this beautiful tour we went to the gift shop that was very similar to that of Georgetown, then got on the bus back to the school. 
After school, we split into two general groups; one went to the souq waqif and one went to the MOQ, or the Mall of Qatar, which is where I went (picture 4). It is the most extravagant malI have ever seen, with a roller coaster, a cinema, and most exciting of all, a food court with practically every type of cuisine under the sun. We had very good milk shakes and Atala, which was something like the Moroccan version of hibachi. We saw the assortment of shops that the mall had to offer and we were rendered speechless. We had a great time and we hope to go back another time. 

After this, we all went home and slept after this long but exciting day. 

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