On Sunday February 21st, the year of the Tiger has started. It was a coincidence that the start of the New Year or the Spring Festival as the Chinese call it, coincided with our Carnival Sunday. Because of this, we celebrated this big event already on Thursday, Feb 18th in our home restaurant, Yong Kee in the Bosschstraat. “We” is a number of Chinese and non-Chinese staff members and lots of Chinese students. And, nothing is more fun than having a dinner with Chinese people, that is to say if the dinner is a Chinese dinner. It was the type of “round table – dig in” dinner and in such an environment Chinese students feel very comfortable.
For me, it is a pleasure to see the students that we have met in China at the fairs, in Maastricht and share our experiences from China and the Netherlands, in the Netherlands. Having been in their hometowns, there is always an easy start for a talk. I must say that most of the students have to undergo a huge shock when they come to Europe and I admire them for their capability to adjust so quickly to the Dutch way of living. In general students like Maastricht a lot for the obvious reasons like an old city, a cozy city and close to a number of interesting European cities. But also the student that went to Venlo is very enthusiastic. She lives with an older lady and nearly each weekend she and her landlady go on a trip in the neighborhood of Venlo for sightseeing.
Well, despite my objections, yes indeed, there was Karaoke! Without Karaoke, there is no party as my regional account manager for China, Xiaoyan Zhang and her assistant Wang Zhen, claim. It is the icing on the cake, so to say. Thus in the restaurant there was this huge sort of tape recorder connected with lots of cables to a huge flat screen. At around 8.30 PM, the big Karaoke event was about to start. However, after pushing a number of buttons by various persons, nothing happened. No texts appeared on the flat screen. No worries, quite a few people seemed to know how these machines work and after a lot of discussions, pushing and shouting, the machine started up. Students were queuing to sing the songs. And, as I have experienced before, in Australia, these are of course Chinese songs and Chinese texts so we non-Chinese needn’t be afraid of having to sing. It was a bit strange though to see a Chinese text and on the background a sort of promo about Paris or Barcelona or Wien. May be the songs were about European cities? No, not at all said my neighbor. These were all love songs and songs about the hard life in the rural area in China. There was not any connection between the text and the background tapes that were on the screen. And then there was a big smile and I loved it. I think that these sorts of events give me the energy to make this university an even more international university.