My campus is a jungle

(I promise to take some good pictures of what I am describing as soon as I can. I couldn't do it so far due to higher security measurements at my university. But I try to do it in the next days)

The Quaid-I-Azam university, which I have chosen to stay for several months, is a bit out of the Islamabad city. When driving there, you get to a crossroads where you can either decide to go in direction of Bari Imam (a local shrine) or through a big portal onto the campus of the uni

.

The first time I entered the uni campus, I was literally not able to shut my mouth out of astonishment. It is huge, it it wild, you even need taxis to drive you from one institute to the next. Some smaller rivers make their way through the hilly terrain, hidden by long grass. Huge old trees stand as posts next to the driveways. It goes the rumor that they wanted to make the campus nice and neat some time ago, but that the Quaidians (so are the students of Quaid-I-Azam called) protested against it.

There is a general administration block, where the busses stop in the morning and from where they leave two times in the afternoon/evening. Big blue busses with the „Quaid-I-Azam“ writings on them. Which bus is yours? You can find t out by looking at the handwritten Urdu-table in the administration block.

And you should! Because they change the bus numbers every now and then. Suddenly it's not number 17 anymore that brings you to Rawalpindi, but number 3. Better you find out before you hop on the bus...

On time of arrival or leaving, they are crammed full with students, not leaving any space (although they are still sitting gender-ordered: male students in the back, female students in front. And it is astonishing that there are always more female students in the busses. Are there more female students at uni? Or just more taking the bus?).

The part of the campus with my institute is quite far out from the other institutes. It is jokingly referred to as the “Bangladesh-campus“ (after the eastern part of Pakistan, which was “lost“ 1971 in a war with India and gained its independence, today known as “Bangladesh“). When going with a taxi to uni (because I didn't want to stand up in the early morning at 6 to get the bus or my courses are later), I have to argue nearly every time with the driver that this is still a part of the university and that I'm not gonna pay more.

The institute, which stands with the institute of psychology and the regional studies of africa and southamerica, feels a bit like a small island, in the safari-park like far stretching campus-site. A good thing of being in Pakistan and not in an african country is in this respect that the animals you might meet aren't tigers but rather cows that are strolling by....