Food in the Hunan province

The food in the Hunan province is quite spicy because the summers are very hot (as most people locally explained to me). There are everywhere lots of food vendors with interesting dishes.

During our Sunday walking tour we had lunch in a small village to enjoy a farmer's meal. Note the chicken head in the dish in the center top of the photo above....

Zhangjiajie in China

This past weekend I visited the Hunan province for work meetings on Monday in the city of Shangde. In this province is a natural park located where the landscape is sensational. Most scenes of he movie "AVATAR" were shot in this park, and they left a few souvenirs...

The rock formations in this park are very particular and were formed millions of years ago after one of the ice-ages. My colleague Nick shows one of the craziest rocks I have ever seen...

The scenery is truly spectacular and we walked for about 10 kilometers along paths in this park with also lots of stairs up and down. A great work-out on the Sunday morning.

The people who lived in this region for thousands of years have a demonstration village and museum of how their traditions have been created and maintained throughout the centuries. The photo above shows a bride-to-be who has to go through a preparation period of "weeping". Don't ask....

As always with these ancient cultures, very colorful clothing and amazing music instruments. The photo above is in front of a place where they perform concerts with those huge drums. The village where we stayed was beautiful in the early morning when we started our walking tour.

It was a very nice Sunday with my colleague Nick, one of our colleagues in China and our tour guide from the local people. She does that 10 km tour almost every day; super fit lady!

Rainy Saturday in Shanghai

For a few days in China where we had meetings with Seneca's partner institutions in Shanghai yesterday. Today - a rainy Saturday - I went for a walk. As always the interesting contrast of the "old" and the "new" in a city like this.

A restaurant with Indian cuisine in a street with the traditional buildings. Also Spanish and Italian restaurants around the corner and more and more competitors for Starbucks...

And already a real Christmas atmosphere in our hotel, complete with European style mini train and landscape (like I had at the attic of my parents home in Holland 50 years ago). Interesting...

Tonight on our way for a few days exploring a new partnership opportunity in the Hunan province. Just five days on the ground here this time. Back to Toronto again on Tuesday.

CBIE conference

This week I attended the annual conference of the CBIE, the Canadian Bureau of International Education. The conference always has a focus on servicing students who come to Canada from around the world as well as assisting Canadian students who go abroad. The conference ended with a session on the future (how will things look like in the year 2050) followed by comments from three current students: one from Canada who had just completed a study abroad experience, and two from international students in Canada. Very nice way to end the conference.

Visitors from China

This week we hosted visitors from the JIT (Jiangsu Institute of Technology) from Nanjing in the Jiangsu province in China. Jiangsu is a sister province with Ontario, and Seneca has an ongoing partnership with JIT. We discussed new activities such as summer schools where we bring groups of students together from JIT and Seneca for innovation programs with participants from a wide variety of disciplines and have them work in a PBL format (Problem Based Learning).

We also hosted this week colleagues from SIT, Shanghai Institute of Technology with whom Seneca has a partnership for IT degree programs and animation programs.

The week ended with a farewell dinner for Hilary who will be off to Australia for a year....

Diwali event at Seneca

Diwali is a very important annual celebration event in India. With many students from India at Seneca it was decided to organize a small event for this festival of lights. One of the city's Indian dance schools brought some of their students for a short performance.

Afterwards our students performed what they call the more popular "Bollywood dances". Lots of fun for everybody. There was food and some of the typical Indian hand-painting.

We are hoping to launch a new study tour to India for students the coming year. Some of the students at the event did sign up for an information session. All in all a nice Friday evening for a few hundred of our students at Seneca. Good cooperation between the Seneca Student Federation, the college's HR department and Seneca International.

Colombians one day in Niagara

Today I took our Colombian colleagues to Niagara, where we had lunch in the Niagara College training restaurant (one thing I do miss at Seneca where we do not offer culinary programs). In the early morning we visited the famous waterfalls (they made many photos but I forgot...; I have been there too many times). Afterwards we had a tour of the wetlands behind the NOTL campus of NC where students from the eco-system restoration program work diligently on bringing back certain eco systems. Very interesting for our Colombian visitors + thanks to Team NC!

The day before we had the Colombians visit Durham College where they have a specific water treatment technician program. This shows them how we complement programming between the colleges in Ontario (also thanks to Team Durham for hosting them!).

Very interesting to also always see how the colleges work with indigenous communities in making sure that our work is inclusive and respectful as much as we can. After the NC visit we visited one of the regional water treatment plants and the Colombians did some shopping in an outlet mall...

Two more days with our Colombian colleagues and hopefully they go home with impressions and comparisons which they can further elaborate on.

Trainees from Colombia

This week at Seneca we are hosting four trainees from SENA, the national vocational training institute in Colombia which offers each year access to short to long term training to 7 million Colombians (and the organization with whom I worked from November 2012 to January 2014; see my blog posts of that period; it is actually when I started this blog four years ago).

The visitors come to study our programs in the environmental (water treatment) sector as part of a bi-lateral program between Colombia and Canada. One of the Seneca experts in this field showed today how the Seneca programs try to build a complete environmental set of skills for our students.