University of Haifa was around 20 minutes drive from Dan Panorama Hotel. The taxi ride was pleasant enough, despite slightly heavy morning traffic. The weather was fine too. At around 15 degC, we were quite comfortable with a simple piece of jacket on. I noticed that the journey to our destination was, on most part, one that was going up-gradient. The university was on elevated ground.
The lessons were held at the "Main Building", which at 29-storeys was the tallest structure on campus. It was quite old, I'd say perhaps over 40 years old. Our classroom as on the top floor - room 2901 (here's one for the Wednesday draw). I was glad to find that I could get wireless internet connection in the classroom.
We had lunch at the canteen located on the 1st storey of the Main Building. There were only 4 stalls - a cafe-type stall that sold coffee and snacks, a MacDonald's stall, one that sold western food, and one that sold "chinese" food. I ordered their 2+2 meal, which meant choosing two staples (noodles/rice/potatoe) and two sides. I took their chow mein + rice + breaded chicken + spicy beef combo, plus a bottle of peach-flavoured water. The cashier relieved me of 29 NIS, which was about S$12. Quite costly, especially considering that this i campus price. The students here must all have rich parents.
After lunch I paid a visit to their acclaimed (there was a campus staff who came in the morning to "sell" their campus facilities) Haifa University Library, which was the largest university library in Israel, with a collection of over 4,000,000 books, CDs and videos. I asked the security (they have security guarding the entrances to practically everything) whether there were any computers with internet connections. He said yes and pointed me in the direction. I didn't bring my laptop today so was happy to be able to use the PCs to send an email back to office to ask them to check and follow up on the air-ticket mess up that we encountered yesterday. Managed to also send a few quick sms'es using SingTel's free online sms-chat service.
Dinner was hosted by the President of Haifa University. I didn't catch his name when David made the introduction. What I did catch though, was that he was a professor specialising in the topic of "Love". Halfway through dinner (the stuff looked and tasted suspiciously like those from the canteen stalls), Professor Love stood up and gave an address. His curly hair looked slight unkempt and he kept adding "Eh, eh" to every other word he uttered. Somehow he reminded me of Geoffrey Rush. In his speech, Prof Love noted that his although his area of speciality had little to do with the subject of our programme on security and counter terrorism, these two apparently unrelated topics had one similarity, and that was expressed in the saying:
All is fair in Love and War
People who are in love, or at war often do things they wouldn't normally do, or even things that might be deemed immoral.
Interesting annecdote from an interesting University President.
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Here's where we had most of our classroom based sessions.
Jaimie was super cranky and teary when her grandparents and uncles came. She hung on to Clement like a kola bear and cried very hard. There was no way we could pacify her. Then, my brother took out the cake he bought for her. Jaimie saw the picture of Elmo on the cake and she got excited. She insisted in blowing candles on the cake (she learnt it from Maisy... =_=). To make the birthday girl happy, we lighted the candles at least 6 times for her to blow. I took out the Pooh Bear agar agar, Jaimie insisted she wanted to blow candles on Pooh Bear again. Well, I think I have used up the entire box of matchsticks just to light up candles!!
