In addition to the IT related work in Check-IT, the students are also involved in cross cultural activities to learn about each other’s culture. The biggest cultural activity we will have this semester is the Dutch Culture Day which will be held on the 8th of December 2016. During this day we will show everyone who is interested from Xiamen University about typical Dutch culture. There will be many different activities and parts to this day that we as students have to organize. I (Dave) am the Dutch student leader from Check-IT group 15 so together with the Chinese student leader (Xiao) we will oversee the organization of this event.

In the morning of the event at 10:00 there will be an opening ceremony to open the event. This part of the day is most important since we will get special guests from Xiamen University and the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Guangzhou. For this part Tara made an invitation letter which you can see in the picture next to this blog. We did sent this invitation to our guests from the university and the consulate. There will be a couple of speeches to be held during the opening ceremony and I will be the host of this ceremony together with Shirley. After the speeches are finished we will perform an opening dance to officially open the event. We practice this dance in the hallway of our office at the Xiamen University Software School.

After the Dutch Culture Day has started everyone is free to walk around and look at all the information about The Netherlands. We have make five very big boards that will display all kind of facts about The Netherlands. This is the main part of our event and will show the people the most information about the Netherlands. I have asked Dutch students: Danny, Ruben, Jochem, Margot, Terry, Daniel and Rhea to prepare the content for these boards. After we have gotten all the content we send it to the designers Emma, Victoria, Yanpei, Sun and Penny and they made the final posters that will be printed on 2m x 1.2m boards.

There will be the opportunity to play some traditional Dutch games. We have three traditional Dutch games that people in the Netherlands sometimes will play during a family day. “Eierlopen”, “Ezeltje prik” and “Spijkerpoepen”. Jochem will oversee the games and there will be Chinese and Dutch students to explain the game in multiple languages so everyone can understand the rules.

Another part of the Dutch Culture Day is that we want to let people taste different types of Dutch food. We have a team of students: Emma, Margot, Silke and Esat who will prepare all kinds of Dutch food the day in advance. They have been looking everywhere to find the right ingredients to make the food taste as close to the food you can get in the Netherlands. To test if they could make the food they first prepared it in a small amount. A picture of the preparations is included next to this blog post.

Looking at everything we have done I do think that this will become a great activity! Organizing a big event like this is a lot of work but a good learning experience for when you want to organize another maybe even bigger event in the future. After we have had the event another blog post will describe how the Dutch Culture Day went.