Closing the minor period

I finished my report for the HKU about the period in Sweden. I also want to make some structure in the blogg. Therefore I have put all messages in four categories, based on what my first teacher there wrote about studying in another country.

• an academic journey
• a cultural journey
• an intellectual journey
• and an emotional journey

Next to these categories you can of course still read every post from start to end. And also, read my report for the HKU (although it is in Dutch).

Thanks for being an audience. Although there weren’t that many reactions on the blogg itself, I got a lot ‘offline’. All supported me and learned me new stuff. Thanks for that :) Frida recently told that a friend of her was following both our blogs with a feeling of inspiration. That was really wonderful to hear. I hope it was interesting. For me it helped a lot to write things down. And it was an easy way to update the people ‘back home’ :)

For now I stop this blogg I think. I don’t have the need for it that much anymore. It is something I did when traveling. The posts from this blogg will go to an archived place on my website to which I will link from here. And one day I will have another blog of another travel; which for sure, will come :)

One thing to close, the tips I wrote in my report for HKU for other traveling students.

“The tourist sees what he came to see. The traveler sees what he sees.”

Go without too much preconceptions, look at the world like it is and remember, that how different people may be, the country is not in a crisis, so apparently, their way of working works fine too.*

Culture is so much more than just ‘fine-art’ culture. It’s how people act and think. Which structures are being made, what people think is normal, what things they completely overlook because they never do that kind of things and how close you are with people. If you’re starting to see that, you’ll ’see’ a lot more. If you hold on to the glasses of conclusions and preconceptions you actually are holding on to your own culture which makes it a lot harder to learn from the other culture.

* Which says something interesting about countries being in a crisis right now :)

Tags: blogg, crisis, culture, hku, inspiration, traveling

Categories: a cultural journey, an academic journey, an emotional journey, an intellectual journey