If you’re doing the same job for a long time, then it can be quite refreshing to just do something totally different I guess you normally don’t learn that much new stuff. So why did you choose to learn Chinese specifically?Īnnemieke: Because it’s like totally different. We just mainly want to do different things that you normally don’t do in work. So they think you take the whole period to travel and travel and travel, but that’s not our idea.

A lot of people say, “Oh! I want to do that.” But somehow they expect if you take a sabbatical you’re just going to travel the world, so they ask you, “Ok, so where are you going? Which countries are you going to?” Well, uh, just one. How did your family and friends react to this plan?Īnnemieke: I think everybody was very enthusiastic. So we looked around for where we could do this and ended up here.

And then we were thinking where to go, probably Shanghai because we like big cities and thought it would be a bit easier than Beijing, from what we heard-more international and things like that. I think it was that came up with the idea to maybe learn Chinese. So we wanted to take a step back and do different stuff mostly stuff we had always wanted to do but also to get out of our comfort zone. Mattijs: The reason for us to do a sabbatical is that we’ve been in our jobs quite a long time, 15 years. Why did you come to China to learn Mandarin? So why did they choose to spend 10 weeks in Shanghai learning Chinese? Together, the mid-40s-year-old couple is taking a 9-month sabbatical from their respective jobs as a manager for a criminal forensics team and a software engineer for the insurance industry. Two students, Mattijs and Annemieke, came to GoEast in late May from the Netherlands. GoEast teachers: Dana Chen 陈乔丹 and Sophia Suo 索菲娅įavorite Chinese phrase: 好啊 (hǎo ā! excellent!)

Other languages: Dutch (native), English, German, French

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