Since I want to join in a photo competition from the German Foreign Academic Department (”Akademisches Auslandsamt”), which asks students now in abroad to post their best picture taken in their country. The winner photo(s) are published and also win prizes (like a travel coupon).
My four favorites are these, but if you remember a perticularly good photo from my blog, just tell me.
I can only post one photo. The deadline is May, the 29th. Please help me by giving your opinions! 
Before I came to China, I had a party at home, my birthday party, and celebrated together with (nearly) all of my near friends. I got many great presents, especially many in regard to my upcoming stay in China. Among were books, lots of food (German as well as Chinese), and one T-shirt, three of my best friends made for me. They drew the TV-Tower of Shanghai and even wrote some Chinese characters on it, that I could not yet read at this time 
During the party, all my guests wrote their signatures on it. Read the rest of this entry » »
Today I met 赵铮 (Zhào Zheng) to have my first lesson in Chinese calligraphy. She is one of two students I helped to learn German before, in order to study in Germany. We started with practicing the single kinds of strokes before taking the challenge of painting the first Chinese character, 永 (yŏng; meaning “forever”), which contains all of them. Zhao Zheng even gave me a small Calligraphy set (文房四宝 wén fáng sì băo), consisting of two brushes (笔 bǐ) the ink stone (Tuschestein; 墨 mò), rice paper (宣纸 xuān zhǐ) and 砚 (yàn, which is the basin, the ink is prepared in).
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Sichuan province is in the middle of China, west from Shanghai, and is famous in China for its good and spicy food, the traditional tea-houses, the nice landscape and beautiful girls. I went there last week together with Georg, Min and Mark, a friend of Georg and Min from France, who also studied at our university in Shanghai. We started last Tuesday (two days before the national festival in the 1st of March) and came on back Sunday night. By train it would probably take about 40 hours to get there, but we took the airplane, which took only about 3 hours.
Map of Sichuan: Read the rest of this entry » »