Coming back to Study?

After spending three months here in Xiamen, I really feel at home here. All possible phases have passed and I think I am fully adapted here to the Chinese culture. Although there are still things that even I think is weird. For some reason, I am already starting to feel sad when I think about the fact that I have to go home in only eight weeks and that this phase of my life will pass. Although I get pretty happy at the thought of seeing my friends again, I made quite a few here in Xiamen which means I have to wave them goodbye.

Like I wrote in my last post, we received a new job here in a bar called the “Chocolate Pub”. This is a bar that specializes in R&B and the decoration is supposed to represent Thailand. Our task is pretty simple, just be there and talk to customers when they talk to you. Not a hard job, but most of us are quite tired of the job already. It sounds so perfect, just party and drink of free. But in reality, the first few nights are great. But partying three nights in a row with (a lot) of free drinks and every night the same music and the same performers becomes very boring. As we work on Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 21:30 till 02:00, we simply have not time to go to different clubs. Therefore most of us decided to quit after 10 days and Rob has stopped already (He is old, 26 grandpa!). But I am currently trying to arrange something else which includes free drinks but no pay and come and go whenever we want in a new bar, that is better for our health I think! Working in a bar has its privileges, being in a bar that much gives you the possibility to see the same people quit often. This resulted in two new friends that I find very fun to hang out with so far, at this stage I am not sure how it will develop itself as one of the girls might be a bit too old for me..(28) but there is no harm in getting to know each other and see where is goes. Yesterday we went on a date and I learned here to skate on ice, it was really funny to see as it is quite unusual for a Thai girl to skate on ice since Thailand doesn’t really contain frozen water. In fact it wasn’t really skating but more “standing and not trying to fall”, afterwards we visit the local shopping district and sat down to have drink. Quite a nice evening, unfortunately she works six nights a week as the singer of the Chocolate club. So It will be hard to meet more often as she works at night, and I work during the day…

The CHECK-IT projects are developing pretty nice, my job for the website team is actually coming to an end as most design work has been done. The coders are currently working very hard on realizing the project and I get time to focus a bit more on the DVD project and a new project for the knowledgebase team. So there is still a lot of work and limited time, there are only eight more weeks left! Not to mention my family is visiting pretty soon which means 10 vacation days for me (I don’t complain!) We will traveling during the holidays to Beijing, Chengdu, Xi’an and Yangshuo so I do get to see more from China as so far I have only visited Wuyi, Xi’an and Xiamen.

As I mentioned before, I am really enjoying my stay here in Xiamen. The fact that I feel so at home here got me thinking about the possibilities to come back here in the future. I spoke with one of the Chinese professors about Chinese major studies on multimedia design and they have several, the only problem is that they are not in English. The University is currently looking for a way to provide me with English support if I decide to come back and do a major study at the Xiamen University. Something I am considering quite seriously! After all China will be one of the biggest IT countries in the world and studying there will give me a big change on a bright future. But unfortunately I still have a year and a half to go in the Netherlands. So quite enough time to think about it, but I am sure that this internship won’t be my last visited to Xiamen.

The Chinese students and the Dutch are working together very well, at the beginning we had some troubles communication but I get the feeling that those troubles are hardly there anymore. We learned to collaborate pretty well, or at least my group has. I can’t speak for the other teams, but it seem like everything is going very well. Also, my English is really starting to feel like a second language. I have more trouble remembering Dutch words then English words. But that is a common problem when you spend a lot of time abroad, unfortunately my Chinese isn’t getting a lot better. I am definitely starting to learn new words, but the pronunciation is just so different from what we are used to. But it is always good to see how much the Chinese appreciate it when you try to make an effort on communicating in Chinese, it even gets you discounts in the cab! That’s what we found out when Maarten was drunk it tried to talk to the cab driver, perhaps being a bit drunk helped him finding the right tones as he was actually having a small conversation with the guy.

For me it is time to get to work again, I am currently waiting for one of our SCRUM meetings as we finished the SCRUM sprint last Friday. We pick new products to develop from the product backlog today and then we have three solid weeks for producing again. We made the last sprint successfully, so we can be proud again. So far we haven’t missed a sprint although we had to work in the weekends a few time to deliver everything we promised…

Hugs and kisses,

Frenkie

(Written on: Monday 30 November 2009 at 12:57)