The First Experiences

Right now its 19:35 and I've just finished dinner. After two days of starvation due to the lack of anything not made up out of fat for 95% there have been some serious improvements! The Europeans and Australians were all complaining about the lack of bread and vegetables (yes really!) so this morning they served bagels ánd French toast :) This evening taco's and wraps and pasta and rice were on the menu, so enough to chose from!

The schedule has been very tight. The most important lesson here was:
"If you're five minutes early; you're on time.
If you're on time; you're late.
And late is something that doesn't exist here."

This morning our first meeting started at 08:05! Luckily I'm not very jetlagged, for everyone else there is a Starbucks in our hotel to make sure we keep awake :)
So far we've had three different speakers. The first was about cross-cultural communication. The professor gave some interesting metaphors about how cultures can be like icebergs. Only a small tip of it can be seen, but the majority is under the water and that could cause some serious collusion. He also talked about how Americans are generally speaking "to-do" people, while Africans are more "to-be" people. He illustrated this with some very funny anecdotes.
The second speaker was a 25-year old woman who had survived genocide in Rwanda. The third speaker was "on location". This morning we went to the World Bank where one of there representatives talked about the goals and aims of the organisation.

More interesting are the discussions that have been going on in our group. I don't know if I've mentioned it before; but I'm representing Russia. We've been discussing Russia's iceberg (so cultural identity), but have also discussed many different things like leadership qualities. A very interesting discussion was going on this afternoon when we were discussing several statements. One was whether the Chinese censorship of sites like youtube and facebook is a good thing. Surprisingly the two Chinese people in our group were the only two in favour. They thought it was necessary, because the vast majority of the Chinese people wasn't educated well enough to understand the information on the internet and would interpretate these wrongly.
I was very much surprised by this.

The best thing about GYLC so far has been meeting all these different people. From Australia to Nicaragua, from India to the USA and... of course from Holland to Ghana.

ps purchased; sandals and a blazer! :)