Ketchup

Birds flying high you know how I feel
Sun in the sky you know how I feel
Reeds driftin' on by you know how I feel
It's a new dawn, It's a new day ..

We had a rather scary lecture today concerning our year abroad. What with studying German and all that, in September I get thrown out there and have to live there for a year and be a classroom and assistant and things. But apparently there's a great deal of paperwork, such as opening a German bank account and 'registering with the police' that has to be done first, stuff that I'd probably find difficulty with in English. I don't feel nervous about it, I'm just painfully aware of the 'ignorant British mong' aura that's gonna surround me like the plague for 9+ months. To top it all of, it's a pass/fail scenario; I only get to carry on in 4th year if my employer likes me and if I do everything they say to a worthy level.

There's very little doubt that this blog will carry on right over the next year or so, but we've also been told we have to give regular updates about the year back to the University, so they can tell if we're emotionally fulfilled enough not to start losing it while we're away. This might have been a nice sentiment, except that the damn thing has to be in German. My lecturers are gonna be in for a poorly written treat every fortnight or so.

In other happenings, my attention was drawn by something on BBC news to google, where I searched for something that has always been an item of bizarre and macabre interest: suicide bomber/terrorist training camps. I've yet to fully grasp the notion of a 'suicide bomber training camp'. I like to think of that now old scenario; I forget who said it first: A guy with an explosives vest stands before a group of twenty-something hopefuls and says "Right guys, pay attention. I'm only gonna show you this once." There was an equally baffling headline, again on the BBC I believe:- 'Suicide bomber strikes again'. He clearly wasn't very fucking good then, was he?


The crowning video however was the general terrorist training camp, presumably Taliban or Mujahideen or similar. It seems fairly similar to your average army camp at first, bar the fact that everyone looks Middle eastern and there are some fairly angry beards going on. It's guys running obstacle courses, doing the monkey bars, crawling flat on their stomachs - all that stuff. But suddenly there are guys running along and jumping through hoops of fire. What kind of practical use will that serve? One can imagine Al-Qaeda getting their hands on some exclusive SAS training video which someone accidentally taped over with their visit to the circus.

"Jamal, I've obtained a top secret special forces training video! We'll need barbed wire, a decent obstacle course, a nice shooting range and a hoop that we can set alight!"

"A hoop, Rashied?"

"Yes, for us to jump through"

"We have to jump through a hoop?"

"Jamal, to have an army as strong as the Infidels, it's clear we need a burning hoop. If the British soldiers do it then so shall we. The video also says we'll need a couple of elephants, a monkey riding a trike and a novelty undersized car."

Stupid terrorists.