Since I came to Wuxi I am quite exhausted by working everyday as intern at Bosch Diesel. The internship is averagely interesting, not too many special things to learn, since I am mostly programming. The two weekends before the last one I spent with my family to show them Shanghai and bring them back to Shanghai airport, respectively.
Last weekend was different, however. With four other interns from Bosch (and Bosch/Siemens), I travelled to Putuo Shan (普陀山), which is a nice little island south of Shanghai. We took the ship from Shanghai (<1 hour away from Wuxi by train) to the island over night, which took us about 12 hours plus 2 hours after we noticed, we were on the wrong island first, fortunately we noticed it soon enough to get on the ship again 
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I can not believe that this semester will already be finished in about 4 weeks. Especially in between all those language students and foreign students who do their complete studies in China after learning the Chinese language for one year, my one semester seems like a short study trip to another country. Time is running fast here and I feel, the coming three months will be over sooner than I can imagine.
By the way, now it is official: I will stay about two months longer in China than originally planned, because of an internship at Bosch in Wuxi (starting on the 14th of July), that I append to my stay in Shanghai. I will try to rebook my flight back to Germany to the 4th of September 2008, which is the last day before my visa will expire. Unfortunately, the Autumn semester in Mannheim will begin on the 1st of September, which is why I will have approximately… well… 0 days holiday this summer. I really hope that the internship will be cool
In recent times I finally started with preparing for all of my courses. Two of my four courses are taught in Chinese, so I have no major benefit from visiting the lectures (although I do visit one of them because my friends Luo Qi and Jamy are attending it, too ). Of course, I can write the exams in English and since the plan is to learn the content from (English) books in self-study, the first months I was more occupied with travelling, visiting places, having guests and learning Chinese than with learning for exams three or four months ahead. Read the rest of this entry » »
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 » »
Zhejiang province has not only it’s famous capital Hangzhou, but also some other beautiful places, that are not so famous. This province is the southern neighbouring province of Shanghai, also at the southern east-coast of China. During the recent weeks I have been to there twice, the first time to Hangzhou with Mark (Ma Fei) and a friend of him, the second time to Xi Kou and Qian Tong with my two beautiful guests from Germany, Jamy (a Chinese friend) and two of her friends.
浙江省不但有有名县会杭州，而且有别的漂亮的地方。 这个省在上海的南边，也在中国的东南方。上几个兴起我到浙江去了两次。第一次跟马飞，他一个朋友一起去杭州，第二次和我德国客人”喝了那“ (Helena 
)，美图 (Methu ^^), 周喆和她两个朋友一起去溪口，后前童。 Read the rest of this entry » »
Fulfilling a special request of a very good friend, here finally is something to see and listen to from the Incubus concert in Shanghai on 13. March 2008 
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Today we took a tour to the harbour of Shanghai at the east-coast. We took the bus over a very long bridge (one of the longest in the world) and landed on a (almost) lonely island, being surrounded by fog and rain, only having ourselves. Although the weather was really bad, I especially enjoyed the melancholic, lonely atmosphere. So I suggest you just relax and imagine being at this place when looking at the pictures (that’s why most have numbers instead of titles).
Since some questions about Tae-Kwon-Do (chinese name 跆拳道) came up, I would like to give a short overview about this sport while also educating myself about it.
A good source of information I found today is www.barrel.net
“Taekwondo (also written as “tae kwon do”, “taekwon-do” or “t’aegwondo”) is a modern martial art from Korea that is characterised by its fast, high and spinning kicks.”
