Land der Ideen - Fachhochschule Brandenburg

INTERNATIONAL A short trip to Brussels
Belgian students, Belgian beer and German logistics
A FHB English course made a short trip to Brussels and visited HONIM and two DHL plants
The students of the English course taught by
Angela Lloyd in the 5th semester of Business
Administration decided to visit Brussels.
Most of them knew nothing about the city
before, apart from the fact that the European
institutions are there. Here is the article by
Yvonne Ludwig and the WPF English.
We worked on a project with students from
Honim (Hogeschool voor Wetenschap &
Kunst), our longstanding Erasmus partner
university in Brussels. We formed five different
groups, each with a different focus: taboos,
gender, rituals, east/west - north/
south relationships and stereotypes. Each
group was made up of three or four FHB students
and the same number of Belgian students.
We communicated with our partner
group about the respective topic via e-mail.
The main aim of this project was to practice
our English in real life, to get to know Belgium
and Brussels in more detail, but also to
Visit of the Atomium. This is a typical tourist point what you have to visit.
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The first DHL tour through the Hub in Brussels. This was one of the mainhubs in Europe. Now is it Leipzig where
we did the second tour. Fotos (3): Grams
reflect on German culture as well. We exchanged
information and opinions and then
every group prepared a presentation of their
new knowledge to share
with the others. We
enjoyed this exchange,
but only communicating
via e-mail was not very
satisfying for us and so
we decided to try to meet
these students face-toface.
The first consideration
concerned problem number
one: money! Because
travelling to Belgium is
rather expensive for poor
students like us, sponsoring
seemed like the best
solution. We wrote to a
few companies and local
TV-channels to ask them
if they would be willing to
support us. In addition,
we contacted Mr Helmstädter
to ask his advice.
He promised us some
support from the university
and the right hint for
a sponsor: DHL, who very
kindly offered to sponsor
our bus journey to Brussels,
including a driver
who was really caring for our physical wellbeing
with sausages and coffee. So we started
on Sunday the 16th of December 2007 at
eight o’clock in the morning, very tired, from
Potsdam Main Station to Brussels.
After 9 hours (it felt like 24) we arrived at our
destination. After moving into the rooms of
our nice hostel and having a long hot shower,
we were ready to explore the central part of
Brussels around the famous Grand’ Place.
We all wanted to try what Belgium is famous
for, not chocolate (this was later), but beer, of
course.
After a short night, we met the students from
Honim in a café in the Grand’ Place. Hans
Denruyter and Veronique Graind’orge, two
teachers from Honim, organised a sightseeing
tour with a quiz for all of us so we could
get to know the city and our project partners.
Although it was extremely cold that morning,
we walked around the city and saw the most
famous sights, like Manneken Pis (it’s a
must-see in Brussels), Jeanneken Pis (female
version), Basilica (2nd largest Basilica in the
world after St. Peter’s in Rome) and St.
Michaelis (Notre Dame of Brussels). We completed
our questionnaires and took many
photos to document our city tour.
Later that day, our bus driver took us to the
Atomium. It is a famous building in Laeken
on the Heysel-Plateau in the north of
Infocus 02|2008