I’m doing a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering and had actually planned to get through the semester as usual with a part-time student job. Then the opportunity to teach in China came up, and the idea of sitting in an office updating Excel spreadsheets suddenly lost all its appeal.

What had been on my mind the most beforehand was the AI aspect. The basics of electrical engineering were no problem – that ties in well with my degree. But artificial intelligence wasn’t my area of expertise, and I was actually a bit worried whether my knowledge would be sufficient. That worry was unnecessary. It wasn’t for nothing that ‘Introduction’ was in the course title: it covered basic concepts and simple, tangible examples, not research questions. With what I’d learnt during my degree, I was better equipped than I needed to be – in places, I actually had to hold myself back from delving too deeply so as not to go beyond the course level. Nevertheless, that was precisely what I learnt: presenting even simple content in such a way that someone with no prior knowledge – and in a foreign language, at that – can understand it is a skill in its own right that you first have to develop.

Zaozhuang isn’t one of those cities you’d find in a travel guide. By Chinese standards, it’s considered small, which is quite funny when you come from the Pfinztal. For the first few days, I just walked about a lot and had a look around. What stuck in my mind most were the cars. I’ve been a car enthusiast for as long as I can remember, and what’s driving on the roads there is a whole other world. Electric cars everywhere, makes I’d never heard of before, interiors like a living room with a screen. At some point I started taking photos of number plates and models, which my students found quite entertaining. Two of them then took me to a dealership one afternoon so I could have a sit in one. That was one of the best afternoons of the whole trip.