broad minded » impressions of China

Sorry, but the never-ending story (my last post) only had one part Since my last few days were quite eventful and since I have met many new interesting people who do not speak German, I decided to end the never-ending story and continue in English. If your English is not so good, feel free to use the links for automatic translation on the right side in this post.

David & Sean

On Wednesday, when I was looking for the place to get my student card (I eventually found it ), I met a really helpful Chinese student (PhD student actually) whose English name is David. I asked him whether the student card could be loaded with money to use for paying meals on campus. He confirmed and accompanied me to the place where the card could be loaded. Since we then were right there at the cafeteria, we ate together, which took about 1 ½ hours due to our extensive talks. We exchanged phone numbers on order to stay in contact, and it was not three hours later that David wrote me a message to invite me to dinner and introduce me to his roommate, whose English name is Sean and who already finished studying to work at a large computer company from USA now. It was a nice dinner, including five meals, which everyone could take from. This kind of sharing is common in Chinese restaurants, and also the custom, that the host inviting the others (David in this case) pays the bill. I told him that we should do this at least twice more, so that everyone of us could pay at least once

UMJI German classes

On the same day I also continued my long journey of finding courses that I need. This time I was at UMJI (”Univerity of Michigan Joint Institute”) again. After meeting with my friend from last Saturday, Shi Guang Sha, we went in there together and met one of the professors. I asked about all my three missing courses and he told me about one of them, that they have, about Statistics (one of my desired courses). This course would only last two months (May and June) which could be a problem when trying to get a Learning Agreement with Germany, which means that this course is equivalent to our course there (lasting over three months). Unfortunately the professor I talked to could not provide me further information, which was why I came back on the next day (Thursday).

This time I talked to some ladies at the academic office of this institute, who fortunately had more detailed information. They told me that the aforementioned course would indeed be offered, but was focussed on statistics for engineering and not for business (the kind that I need). But they had there own plans with me: Being in urgent need of teaching assistants for their German classes, they only lurked in their office for people being capable of the German language dropping by by coincidence, not knowing what would await them behind these doors. So I said “OK” and the thing was done. They thanked me a thousand times for being so generous and asked me to send them a resume about me before meeting the German teacher the next day.

When I yesterday came to the German teacher, a woman, I guess from Austria, she thanked me a thousand times for being so generous and then explained me what she needs from me. She told me that she was also new here and would not even know exactly how many students she would be teaching. She said that she would not need me for assisting during classes but for correcting the exams and helping her with technical tasks like building an approptiate system for calculating, saving and notifying about the students grades. We agreed on my kind and extent of employment and I left to wait in the coming days for the contract being made.

When I was walking back to my dorm-room she drove by me by car, together with a professor of UMJI (the institute where she also is employed) and invited me to eat in a restaurant with them. We talked about Germany and China, industries and meals, culture and travel and the professor thanked me a thousand times for being so generous to help with the German courses. I also asked him about courses being relevant for me, but unfortunately he had no new information for me.

There were about 6 different meals tasting very delightful: One was a kind of soup with goose liver and egg, another one small dumplings to be filled by yourself with meat and vegetables, yet another one soup with different vegetables. Also a plate with small balls of goosemeat was served, which included the bones, but cooked so soft that it can be eaten together with the meat (very tasty). A plate with water melons was served after the meal. And since we could not eat everything, four of the meals were wrapped in a box and given me, because both of them did not want it

Georg, Achim and Min

On thursday morning I wanted to go to the lecture “Database Technology and Application”, which is one of my courses for this semester, but I gave up searching the room after about one hour walking around and asking people without success. When I asked the professor, she told me that I was looking for the wrong room, which was the one from last semester, still referred to in her slides (her presentation of the lecture). She also told me about another German student, who could help me finding the room. He then told me that the room I was looking for would not exist anymore beacause they changed all the room numbers this semester

But the German student, his name is Georg, invited me to join him and some friends of him to play Badminton in the evening, so this is what I did. It was Georg and Achim, two Computer Science students from Germany (exchanged here for one year) and Min, a girl from Germany, born in China, having studied Biology-Informatics in Saarbrücken. It was good to do some sports again after two weeks of walking around all day eitheron sightseeing tours or on campus. Also good that I finally bought some sport shoes on Thursday After we played Badminton, they invited me to their appartment (the one of Georg and Achim) to eat some German food and watch a film. Although we eventually did not watch a film, it was a very pleasant meeting and also one that could be repeated a few times during the semester

Wilson and Fù

One more important thing to tell is Davids invitation on Thursday to come to come with him, meeting some of his friends and eating Chinese dumplings, the traditional meal on this day, which was the end of the New Year’s Festival (two weeks after New Year’s Day). So we sat at his friend Fù, a woman who said she was some years over thirty, but I did not believe her and said she must be under thirty Another of David’s friends, his English name is Wilson, was also there, translating what I said to Chinese for Fù and vice versa. Fùs mother made the aforementioned dumplings herself and she did hell of a good job! So it was a very nice evening, which additionally was very helpful, because I spoke much more Chinese than usual, or at least tried to

I took no pictures in the last few days, because I did not want to seem impolilte on the first meeting with all these people. But I promise to catch up with the pictures the next times, when I know the people a bit better

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 5:25 am and is filed under English (英文), Shànghăi (上海). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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