BELGIUM I

After this semester abroad, I can say that it was one of the most important experiences I had in my life until now. Of course, there were moments in between when I would have preferred to be at home. But these moments were clearly outshone by the good moments. I had a really good time in Brussels.

I can still remember my first days when I felt uncomfortable in the city. All the stress, noise, dirt, and the many homeless people were very unfamiliar to me. But I get used to it. However, Brussels doesn't feel like home for me and I’m glad to be back in quiet, clean Switzerland after all this time. But you must remember that living in the city has a lot of advantages that I’ll miss in the village. For example, you can party every night, public transport leaves every minute, and you can go shopping 24/7. Despite all the advantages, I am sure that I will never live in a city.

A lot of my time I spent with international students. I have several examples of cultural practices that were unfamiliar to me at the beginning and then became familiar as the semester went on. For example, I had a lot Italian and Spanish friends. I quickly noticed that they have a completely different daily routine. They get up later and eat their lunch and dinner later for this reason. We sometimes had to compromise on when to eat. The southerners wanted to eat as late as possible and we from central of Europe wanted to eat as early as possible. When it comes to punctuality, there are also big differences between these two cultures. It often happened that only the people from central Europe were at the meeting point at the agreed time. For the others, it is normal to be an hour or two late. At the beginning, this annoyed me a bit because I am not used to being late. But then I accepted their lifestyle with the flexible time and even embraced it. But only when I went out with them.

Another big difference was in a group exercise I had to do at my university. We had to write a paper and then do a workshop for others. My team consisted of 9 people from all over the world. We had team members from the USA, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, China, Malaysia, Japan and France. During the teamwork there were some complications between the people from Europe and America and from Asia. I noticed that they have a completely different attitude towards work than the usual attitude in Central Europe. The people from Asia are hard-working people. While all the other students are going out to make party on Saturday night, most of the students from Asia are busy with university stuff. Some of them wanted to schedule group sessions for Saturday evening, which was not at all okey for us from Central Europe and America. During the sessions, I noticed that we were much more direct than the people from Asia. This really annoyed me at first because they couldn't tell me when something is not okey for them. I also noticed that the people from Asia prefer to work for themselves rather than in a group. Despite all the differences, we ended up with a good result in our group work. We accepted the different attitudes to the work and just let each other do it. In the end, the people from Asia contributed much more to the group work than the people from Europe and the USA, but it was okey for everyone.

Even though I didn't really learn much about the Belgian way of life and culture, I was able to gain important experiences in an international environment that I can use in the future.

Ramon Mattle, December 2021