Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 2)

Trier claims to be the oldest city in Germany. It has certainly been around for a long time and is home to the University of Trier that is the convenor of a Chinese course that I was invited to by the German National Academic Sciences foundation. It forms part of the selection process for a China scholarship that is awarded based on the outcome of the language course and a selection interview. Trier is a beautiful and not to big city that is mainly famous for two things: it’s Roman history and being the birthplace of Karl Marx. The latter explains why there are many Chinese tourists roaming around in the city. Another reason for a visit is its’ wine making history that was particularly strong in the suburb that I stayed in. The local “wine fest” that took place on the day I arrived supposedly attracts a million visitors, which is quite respectable for a suburb with just over 100 inhabitants.

Studying at a German university

This was my first time studying at a German university. We were at the department for China studies and thus being taught by the Chinese teachers that normally teach students of China Studies. The university has a real campus that was planned all at once in the 80s meaning that everything is similarly looking (whether nice or not is up to you). I found it to be quite nicely integrated into nature and I certainly enjoyed having more space than at UCL where being in London’s centre means a chronic shortage of teaching and learning spaces. Plus, the mensa (cafeteria) offered nice food for a change that included exotic stuff like a wok stand and a burrito place with a bbq corner right next to it.

Learning half a year worth of Chinese in 3 weeks

We had lessons from 9 until 4:30 every day except for Sunday for the whole three weeks, which meant quite a lot of work outside of the classroom. There was of course a lunch break as well. I was assigned the course for people with prior knowledge, which meant I (with 3 weeks prior course experience) was together with students with courses worth 1 year of university level Chinese study. This would have been fine, but I was not prepared for the complexities of trying to learn a lot of characters in such a short time. There were roughly 40 new characters to learn every day, each of which represents a sequence of strokes that are luckily somehow following a pattern and even logical sometimes. Nonetheless, I had great difficulties with writing them on request. Plus, while I was quite good at Spanish after 4 weeks of intensive learning in the summer of 2014, this time my skills hadn’t increased nearly as much. The main factor in this as I understood was that one must learn how to read every sign one sign at a time, which is extremely time consuming. The language itself is very basic and the grammar is a dream after trying to learn Russian for the last few years where you have six cases (adjective, dative etc.). Chinese doesn’t have cases and so everything is just a logical addition of words.  我在大学学习汉语 for example means literally I at university study Chinese. You neither have to conjugate the verb depending on gender etc. nor do you have to worry about plural. Just add 们 (men) after any person and it makes it plural. I could go on for hours about how great Chinese is. Another example is weekdays that work the following way: Monday is Week 1, Tuesday is Week 2 and so on. Numbers are also used for months in a similar fashion.

In the future, I will try to be more consistent with my language and above all character praxis.  Thus, I hope to gradually increase my knowledge of characters, which I see as the main challenge when learning Chinese. The grammar and talking seems to be manageable. Below you can find some pictures of the city, the university and my dorm.

After learning a little bit of Korean (hardly more than reading the alphabet that roughly corresponds to what we understand under alphabet), I went to Seoul.

This was my first time in Asia that I was not in China (not counting Singapore) and there are some key differences between what I saw in Seoul and what I saw in China. Korea can be described as the Switzerland of Asia for a few reasons. First, it is rather small compared to its neighbours. Korea has around 50m inhabitants whereas Japan already has beyond 100m and China is well-known for its population size. Second, it is quite well developed and plays a very important economic and cultural role in its region. On the one hand, companies like Hyundai, LG and others are popular worldwide. On the other, Korean K-pop and make-up are just some of its cultural exports that are especially popular in Asia. Third, it’s quite traditional in its values that are very strict in comparison to Europe. Fourth, Koreans live democracy quite intensively in that there are many demonstrations and constant stands on the main road in front of the palace. Protests in Korea have a history of resulting in important change. Fifth, everything is quite nice – the infrastructure works well and the appearance of Seoul is quite neat in some areas and traditional but well-kept in others. People say that the difference between Koreans and Chinese is that Koreans have nice and white teeth. Unrelated fact: Koreans are also crazy about plastic surgeries. All in all, it is just impressive to see how this country has developed from the ruins of the Korean war in these few decades since then.

This rapid development means that Seoul is quite an impressive city as the biggest of all cities in South Korea. It features some aspects that Western cities would profit from, including rapid bus services that have their own lane in the middle of the road.

There were a few things that were “typically Asian”. First, the cicadas are making incredible noise during the day in the summer just like in Beijing. These are bugs a little bigger than hummingbirds that vibrate with their tails making horrible noise with which they locate their mating partners. Second, we went to a water park that was packed like no other water park that I have seen and required everyone to wear a swimming west and a cap. It was also nicely integrated into a huge shopping centre on the 3 upper floors of the building that also housed a winter paradise. Third, the streets are very crowded at times and the tickets for a popular attraction we went to (night sessions in the palace) are gone in a matter of minutes, even if they are sold newly each week. One aspect that was interesting was that there were special tickets for foreigners that weren’t gone yet and weren’t in high demand either as far as I could see. Nonetheless, there are quite a few foreigners everywhere and particularly in some parts of the city. Fourth, people go crazy about their phones and the characters and designs associated with them. For example, one of the chains you can find everywhere owns stores that sell chat app characters. Just like China, Koreans have their own chat apps (Kakao talk) and search engine (Naver).

To sum up, this culture we’ll hear more of and if it is just that hardly any society worldwide is so divided between people who like a style of music and those who don’t. Seeing a tug of war at a Korean festival between lovers and haters of K-pop showed that people passionately support their respective side.

Data Science in Ukraine

What, where, when:

For July I was at a summer school in data science at the Catholic University of Lviv. Lviv is the “westernmost” city of Ukraine and used to be part of the Austrian empire. Consequently, the flair is not as Ukrainian as it could be I was told. Indeed, the city looks quite European and quite beautifully so as you can see on the pictures below. I was also impressed by the infrastructure in Lviv. Although its’ infrastructure and buildings were not that well-preserved at times, it even had its own bike sharing network. Like in Russia the price level was quite good for Europeans and so transport was very affordable. Lviv has a very warm atmosphere, which might partly have been due to the weather that was quite warm during the summer

Why data science?

Data science is quite interesting at the moment because as technology expanded in the last few years, so did our capabilities in exploring data with it. Machine learning and AI (artificial intelligence) are all belonging to data science and in principle not more than algorithms written in one or the other programming language (as far as the easier areas of it are concerned).

What we learned in data science:

After two introduction courses in Statistics and Machine Learning for the first 4 days we could choose our own courses to pursue 4 topics of our choice. I chose Sentiment Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Recommender Systems and Social Network Analysis. Each of these do what it says on the cover. Sentiment analysis tries to use data to find out about the feelings of the person submitting it, say using a text message finding out what mood it was written in. Natural Language Processing is concerned with all things human language processing by computers, which is already in our phones with programs that understand our voice instructions or recommend words on the keyboard. Recommender systems is what analyses user preferences to suggest the best things to look at next. Apparently, video streaming site customers use this service for a significant portion of their video consumption. Lastly, social network analysis logically analyses social networks meaning that it tries to get pieces of information out of your internet footprint on all the social media you use. The last 4 days were spent on projects we could choose. I chose a project in medical AI where we were analysing alzheimer patient data to see what trends could be observed in the development of their disease. It was interesting that we as students were working on cutting edge research and could even share the results with the research lab of a hospital afterwards.

Why UCU (Ukraine Catholic University in Lviv)?

The German Academic Exchange Service organizes a number of summer programs each year under the  “Go East” umbrella that it endows with scholarships. Although I didn’t get a scholarship for the program it still seemed useful enough for me to try out. Albeit unexpectedly so, UCU is actually a very modern and unique initiative in Ukraine. The country can only be happy to have such high-quality education being offered that I was quite surprised with. Partly foreign-financed, the university has ambitious plans for the future and is already showing an impressive line of achievements. As you can see below, the buildings are modern and interesting learning space.

Extracurricular activities:

The organizers organized a city tour, a castle tour (that I didn’t join) and a pub quiz. The planned movie night was replaced by a meeting in the pub. Besides, I also went to play tennis once with a friend.  Below you can find some pictures of Lviv.

After coming back from Russia, I went to Belgium and Holland for a few days, the first time for me to visit those two countries. For most of the time I stayed in Antwerp but my girlfriend and I also did some trips to Amsterdam, Brussels and Ghent.

The general impression of Belgium and Amsterdam is quite nice. It seems to be like Germany for the most part just that the language is different and that there are some local features unique to each city. One notable general difference is that restaurants are a lot more expensive but no less frequented and that the cities seem more lively.

Antwerp is a very lovely and rather small city except for its huge train station that is especially impressive at night because it goes way below the ground in a grand aula under the historic dome. One feature I noticed is that it has go lots of flags hanging everywhere as you can see below on the city hall.

Brussels on the other hand is quite old in many parts and certainly has the flair of a big european city. What is exhausting is that part of the city is located up a small hill but that makes for great sundowns in turn when sitting on the hillside.

Amsterdam is many people’s favourite city and that is certainly understandable when you visit it. We rented a bike for most of our stay and the canals are a great way to discover the whole city. Logical when the whole city is made up of canals? As you can see on the pictures the typical street in the centre really is just a small road to the left and the right of a canal flowing in the middle. Of course you also smell weed the moment you step out of the train.

27/08/2017:

Saint Petersburg in the summer:

Although I had already been to Saint Petersburg in the winter the summer is a completely different story. The flair of the city becomes very warm and the beauty of the buildings, parks and palaces seems more vivid in the sunlight. Plus, it hurts less because you don’t feel like the wind is just unbearably cold.

The highlights in pictures of a 3 day trip I made with my girlfried are listed below. It is a even more of a crazy city in the summer as you can see. I could now take some time to write a description of all the places in the pictures below but instead I thought I keep this as a quest: those who want to find out about the depicted places can do so through their own research independently. These places are all well-known so it should not be too hard. Saint Petersburg is one of these cities where having done a little bit of research is useful. Enjoy the pics!

Discover Russia – part 4: Comparing Russia, Germany and the UK
This is the announced final post of the “Discovering Russia” series that seeks to compare my experiences with Russia and its culture with other countries I have lived in. Right away, I want to put in a disclaimer at this point: I in no way intend to be judging any of the countries and cultures I am talking about and I don’t claim that what I say is necessarily true. All this is just my personal impression of these countries that have all developed over centuries in their own right. In addition, because I would like to be more objective in my analysis I would like to use data to analyse this question. I guess the role of my personal impressions is thus mainly filling the data with life. The data used comes from the 6-D Model© developed by Geert Hofstede (2010). If we take his data on Russia and compare it with Germany and the UK respectively we get the following graphs.

6-D Model© by Geert Hofstede comparing Russia with Germany (https://geert-hofstede.com/russia.html, accessed 14.06.2017)

6-D Model© by Geert Hofstede comparing Russia with the UK (https://geert-hofstede.com/russia.html, accessed 14.06.2017)

Whereas I feel like I cannot comment that well on two of the dimensions (uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation), the other aspects describe differences that I think I recognize as described in the comparison that follows.

Russia:

In many ways Russians just talk straight. Two examples of that are the following. First, more often than in Europe, girls on the street might just be addressed by guys that find them attractive. Second, it also occasionally happens that people say how they feel and let everybody know loudly that they are not doing very well.

Furthermore, what is fascinating is that contrasts can be found everywhere in Russia and a good example is the way people talk to you: you can feel hurt and alone one moment because somebody shouted at you for standing in the way and minutes later you find yourself in a fun conversation with a caring babushka (grandmother) who wishes you that you find a girl who “holds you tight and never lets you go again”. On that note, wishing everyone well is actually widely spread in Russia: Success, good mood, health and others are all things you wish someone in Russia when saying goodbye and greeting each other. Lastly, friendship is an intimate and deep relationship and it takes a while until you call someone your friend.

In the data, power distance (acceptance of power inequality) stands out as one of Russia’s most distinct features. According to Hofstede, it can partly be explained with the centralization of power in Moscow and leads to the huge importance of status symbols like foreign cars and western brands. Their importance is quite obvious in Russia: why obvious? Because as soon as you get off the plane in Moscow you get confronted with a high number of expensive “inomarki”, a special word in Russian that stands for foreign cars.

Germany (where I grew up in Stuttgart in the south):

First, Germans don’t say and show what they feel like in public as much. This is not as extreme as in the UK where the answer to “how are you” is normally “fine thanks” but still not as open as in Russia where you can see people’s moods even in their face expressions. I think that one reason for this is that Germans are incredibly worried about how they come across and fare against others. The 6-D Model© incorporates this in the seemingly odd masculinity score where masculinity stands for the extent to which a society is driven by competition and wanting to be the best.

Another interesting aspect is that regional differences are very pronounced in Germany. There are very strong differences between regions, both in terms of quality of life as well as culture. Another aspect is the different dialects everywhere, although they are becoming less and less important I feel. Russia on the other hand does not seem to have much of a difference in dialects, despite the huge size of the country.

A significant difference between Russia and Germany is also that friendship is less strong of a term in Germany. Your friends might well be no more than your local “gossip group”, so a friend is not necessarily your soulmate like here in Russia. This might explain Germany’s higher score in individualism (degree of interdependence in society). In contrast, Russia is a place where friendship and regional bonds with neighbours are very important. Even the language incorporates this: you don’t say “I am going out with my friends” but “we and my friends are going out”.

UK (or rather where I currently live in London, which can be very different from the rest of the UK):

The UK is also very individualistic and heterogeneous in many ways. Especially in London there is not one dominant London culture but many different cultures all mixed together in some way. London is at the most extreme end of the personal freedom scale: everyone is very relaxed and people dress as they wish. Coming across in a certain way isn’t that important as long as you are polite and don’t disturb anyone around you.

What stands out to me is that indulgence (how well people control their impulses) is way higher in the UK than in Russia and I think I understand what this is talking about. British are known worldwide to be controlled and polite. Scenes like the famous queue on every corner of the city enforce this stereotype. In Russia, I could certainly not observe a queuing culture like that. An interesting habit of Russians in queues is that people just note who they are behind and then come back later to join the queue again at that very place.

In summary, this last post of the series offered a very brief comparison between Russia, Germany and the UK. Among the main findings is the difference in power distance that are very obvious on the streets of Moscow. Other differences worth noting are around the model’s masculinity measure, individualism and indulgence. All of these are differences I can back up from my own experience to some extent. With this I would like to conclude the “Discovering Russia” series. I hope that it offers relevant and insightful perspectives.

Last but not least a small anecdote about Russia and how it never ceases to surprise:

Generally, Russian healthcare doesn’t have the best reputation. However, to every rule there is an exception and so when I was recently given the opportunity to look behind the scenes at a private clinic in Moscow I saw a modern and top nodge clinic where I would happily be treated anytime if need be (although, this seems highly unlikely given that it is a women and children hospital). More precisely, the Perinatal Medical Centre (PMC) in Moscow that is the first private maternity hospital and has already delivered more than 30000 babies to date. It is part of the MD Medical Group, a listed company that is one of Russia’s success stories and still growing year on year.

The reason for my visit was an invitation to a press gathering on the occasion of the opening of the new Miscarriage Treatment Centre at the PMC. CEO Kurtser welcomed us with leading members of his team at a short press conference before they showed us the centre and its facilities. The excursion completely changed my idea about healthcare in Russia and showed that there are western-style medical services available.

References:

Hofstede, G., Hofstede G. J., & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind. Revised and Expanded 3rd Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.