Life has been a bit hectic lately which is how I came to find myself recording the links for the latest Absolutely Intercultural podcast in Aarhus airport and using a 4 hour wait in Copenhagen airport to edit together Show 96. So you’ll have to excuse the odd lost word or two as someone clatters in the background. There was no intentional theme to this show but as I was putting it together I realised that here were two people who had travelled half way around the world to visit my part of Europe and in fact there were one or two common themes in both their stories.
Having seen the cliché acted out in a credit card advert it was great to be able to find out for real what it feels like to experience snow for the first time in your life. I was able to do this when I talked to Minhaaj Ur Rehman from Pakistan who has recently moved to northern Sweden to do an MBA in Umeä. And yes, he did stay outside to experience it and he described it as pieces of cotton falling from the sky.
Back in the university buildings he finds that the most striking difference is the lack of hierarchical difference between the students and their teachers. This is a double-edged sword however because on the one hand it means that there is room for discussion but on the other it can go too far with the students behaving in ways which almost disrupt the class, by being late, leaving early, playing or IM-ing on the laptop throughout the class and so on.
My other interviewee was Cao Lei, a teacher at the University of Science and Technology in Heifi, China who inadvertently stirred the age-old controversy of whether the UK is part of Europe or not when I asked her whether this was her first visit to Europe and she asked whether a visit to the UK counted as Europe or not. I was certainly surprised that Cao Lei thought that the Netherlands, the worlds most densely populated country, was peaceful and quiet. We had taken Cao Lei to an event at our daughter’s school and this led to a comparison of the school day for an average 12 year old. It was quite shocking to learn that Lei’s 13 year old daughter devotes 18 hours of every day to school work in one way or another. Even more shocking to discover that the typical Chinese university student is expected to work longer hours!
Cao Lei’s physical presence in our house meant that we could explore the conundrum of how to represent Chinese characters on a laptop. So we got a demonstration of how Chinese represented by the English alphabet can be turned into Chinese script by the computer. The answer is that for every word represented by letters the word processing program offers up to 12 choices of how that could be translated into Chinese script. The right choice then has to be indicated by keying in the corresponding number of that choice. That made writing a short sentence quite a long job. I was a bit doubtful whether this would make good radio but we did it anyway!