The past three weeks I have spent at Reed College at SIIC, the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication. SIIC is one of the most famous summerschools in the intercultural field, and it was amazing!

It started on the fourth of July, when I arrived at the beautiful campus of Reed College, a very expensive private college - the one Steve Jobs dropped out off. The summer was certainly there (for a great part of the three weeks I spent here it was beautiful weather), now only the institute had to move their office to the campus, which was one of the first tasks us Fellows were assisting with. SIIC Fellows are the ones who help run SIIC - we decorate the campus with carefully selected posters and flowers, help move the office from downtown to Reed campus, welcome participants to the campus, support the faculty with their workshop and help out in the bookstore or with social gatherings. In return, we get an extra week of workshop on Personal Leadership, have ‘easy' access to the faculty running the workshops, get the chance to work in an intercultural team on all those tasks and create connections with some amazing people from around the globe. And you get to return to SIIC at a very nice price too :-)

The team of Fellows was one thing that made the experience a memorable one: our countries included China, Costa Rica, Morocco, Australia, Germany, Austria, India, Singapore/New Zealand, Poland, Dubai, Ireland/Canada and of course the US - and our ages, backgrounds and areas of work were equally diverse. At first the ‘practical' side of the Fellows programme didn't sound like too much fun, having to put up posters everywhere (and carefully selected ones too - there was a high estethic level we were aiming for!) and putting flowers in every room and then refreshing them twice during SIIC, but I must admit I actually had quite a good time during most of those hours - thanks to our ‘home team', consisting of Mastura, Eric, Flora, Leila and Britney. I especially enjoyed the flower session right before our programme ended - what a fun morning, creating beautiful flower vases with a seamlessly working team while inventing some hiphop moves when waiting for the arrival of new vases to be refreshed!

China was somewhat of a theme for me throughout these three weeks. In the second week I followed the absolutely amazing briefing on China by George Renwick, who has about 800 books on China in his library and has been there regularly to consult for the past 40 years or so. And then there were my Chinese fellow-Fellows, especially Serena, Flora, Parise and Eric, with whom I had lots of nice conversations about Chinese culture and life in China, travelling by yourself in the US, and their choice of English names. That was very interesting - and I'm proud to say that they found a beautiful Chinese name for me: Lan-Xing (‘lan' means blue and ‘xing' fragrance/harmony/calm). So Shanghai is now definitely high up on my list of places I would like to go!

The three weeks were packed with so many things it's impossible to write about all of them here: learning about Personal Leadership (a method to deal with intercultural differences on a personal level), how to develop cultures of collaboration in intercultural teams (my third workshop), following evening programmes on everything from the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity to a review of Edward T. Hall's work, meeting up with old friends from Young SIETAR, and enjoying outings to the Rhodondendron Garden and the Multnomah Falls in our very limited spare time (only two afternoons in almost three weeks). And the learning is not over yet - I'm accompanied with two huge binders full of information, so I won't be bored on the flight home!

To recover from all this intensity, I had a week in the area around Portland which didn't really go as planned... My initial plan was to rent a car and visit Mount St Helens and the coast, but it turned out the car rental agency didn't want my money (long story involving a credit card, SIIC fees and an iPad) - so no car for me... Happily my couchsurfing hosts - a real estate investor and a shin Buddhist priest - stepped in very graciously, picked me up at Reed College and took me to Mount St Helens and to Astoria and Cannon Beach. Especially Mount St Helens was extremely beautiful and impressive. I can't thank them enough. Couchsurfing is amazing!

Now I'm off to New York for a couple of days, then Boston, and then... home!