In this meeting we started with pandas, to be more precise with the hometown of pandas: Chengdu. It is a city in the south of China. More than 20 million citizens live there, that is almost one quarter of German population or more than three times as many inhabitants as the Finnish population!
One website Kaili showed me was about 点. What somehow looks like an animal means site or point. 景点 means place of touristic interest or sight.
Next city was Beijing. It is in the northwest of China. And when you are going to travel there, you have to see the Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing, the summer palace and the Great Wall. It extends through several provinces and is 2500 years old.
Chinese culture and cities are so interesting because they are absolutely different to what I am used to in Europe. At least the ancient buildings. We saw pictures of exhibition items of a museum showing ancient masks or busts. Even those look different to archaeological replicas of heads found in Europe. And what me surprised me more was how the letters are pronounced. “Q”, for example, is pronounced like “ku” in German, but something like “tsi” in Chinese.
This gave me a hint of what the Chinese language is like and what will await me. Next time, Kaili is going to teach me the number. I’m curious about it.
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