Quite unbelievable really

Retardation levels reached dizzying new heights today as the Foundation Induction Week got underway to help the students choose which course they would like to do next year.

The top picture shows two Head of Departments (HoDs) in the middle of a presentation during which they were openly heckled by the students, such was the awfulness of it. At one point, students who had fallen asleep were actually asked to come to the front of the stage to explain themselves. Other highlights included an HoD calling someone ignorant because they didn't know where KFC was and the other extracting a round of applause from the audience as it took him ten years to gain some qualification or other. The students were quite obviously taking the royal piss, but the presenters were so involved in their little bubble of self-importance that they didn't notice/care. Quite unbelievable really.

Before this presentation, some guest speakers talked about the tourism industry, the hard work involved and the satisfaction gained from it all. They were excellent (one was even an OTC graduate) and gave frank and honest feedback about how they got to their respective positions. When one student asked "Why should we serve alcohol when it's haram?" he received a huge clappy response from the others and sat quite smugly in his seat lapping it up. One of the speakers however launched into a speech about following your dreams, getting your hands dirty and thinking about your life - basically he was saying, "if you're going to be a twat about alcohol, what on earth are you at a tourism and hospitality college for?". The speaker also hit the nail on the head when he accurately guessed that around 80% of all our first year students are only at college as it's the cheapest in Muscat and a great way to spend all day sending texts and flirting with each other.

I felt quite embarrassed to be part of the college today.

After dinner and a couple of episodes of 'The Thick of It' (a brilliant political satire of which I believe a film was recently made...?) I settled down to a couple of hours on the piano. 'The Rock' is taking a little more work than I thought, but it's almost there. Back to The Future is the most difficult piece from my movie repertoire, A Beautiful Mind and Gladiator are tricky but do-able, Indiana Jones and Armageddon are the easiest. Things like Titanic, Jurassic Park, Star Wars (Duel of the Fates in particular, the music to the Darth Maul fight) and Transformers are all in the pipeline. I'm hoping that one day I'll be able to sit down at a piano at a function (or something or other) and get paid a couple of hundred for an hour and a half of movie themes. Away from the scores, Mozart's Sonata in G is fiddly little bugger and is the kind of piece that must be worked on slowly and methodically to get something remotely listenableto.

A day of two halves.