Pre-departure:
Visa:
This was my 1st time leaving the country, so the most important thing is to get a passport so that you may apply for a visa. I got my passport in February before I applied for the summer school. Please note that the German embassy is very strict about the size of the visa photo – they then asked me to go to this other shop to take a visa photo specific to the German embassy, so allow time for that.
Pre-departure:
I’ve been obsessed with China for the longest time, their meteoric economic rise and the strongmen behind these novice policies. I’ve been so enamored by this, it became my thesis topic. Travelling to China thus was always part of my master plan, I just did not expect it to happen like this, or this soon.
I applied for the BRICS Summer School at Fundan University to be held for a little over a month in Shanghai, China. I had received a full scholarship for the programme, as well as a travel bursary from the PGIO. Prior to going, Sarah had suggested Maties going get into contact, which I did. We created a Whatsapp group among ourselves, and soon it grew to other South Africans going to the Summer School.
Pre-departure:
On the 4th of July, I embarked on a 21-hour journey (a quick trip by relative standards) to Shanghai, China. I had been selected to participate in a month long summer school, which focused on the role of BRICS in global governance and on the foreign policy of China itself. While I was quite nervous about traveling to China, I was equally excited by the prospect of exploring what was, to me, a truly ‘different’ place. I have been fortunate enough to travel fairly extensively for my mere twenty-two years and in that time, I had never gone to a place which I did not know this little about.