To change a little bit the atmosphere, this article will consist of some facts and numbers about Groningen and my class.

Let’s start first with some facts about the city:

– 567,76 km: is the distance between Paris and Groningen. If you want to travel between these two cities, there is not direct train, nor bus, nor plane. You have to transit in Shipol, Amsterdam, Rotterdam or other city. By train, it will talk about 6 or 7 hours, depending on whether you have to change to different cities, whether your train is late, etc. By bus, you can take the bus between Amsterdam and Paris, and the train between Amsterdam and Groningen.

– 30 min: it’s the approximate time that it takes me to go to school by bike, of course, it also depends on the wind, the cold and my health condition. According to Mister Google, there are three ways for me to go to school, which vary from 6 to 7 km of length. Indeed, Hanze building is in the north-west of the city, and my student house is in the south-east. So every time I go to school, I have to pass by the diameter of the city. But in the winter, it is very cold and windy, so I take the bus. It will take longer, as I just have a bus every 30 min to go to the Central station.

– 5 min: from my student house, I just need about 5 min by bike to go to the city center, the big supermarket Jumbo, McDonald, KFC, Ikea, etc. To go to the Central Station, it takes from 10 to 15 min walking. In short, this is the nice aspect of a little and peaceful city.

– 187 cm: the average height of Groningen man!!! Yes, welcome to the place of the giants! Indeed, Dutch people are the tallest in the world (185 cm for man), and as a Dutch guide explained to us, Groningen, the city of student, also has the highest record in the Netherlands. What about Dutch women? Uhmm… oh sorry…I forgot the data 🙂 I’m just kidding, about 171 cm for Dutch women and 175 cm for Groningen women. So, don’t be surprise of you find around you many people of 2 meters tall. 🙂

Now is the turn of the facts on my class:

– 19 & 9: Our class has 19 students from 9 different cultures, isn’t it amazing? We are from the Netherlands (6 boys), France, Spain, Lithuania, Brazil, German ( 3 girls and 1 boy), Portugal ( 2 girls), Morocco and Vietnam. In addition, we are very gender-balanced: 10 girls and 9 boys. This is quite important for the nice atmosphere within the class, at least in my opinion. Moreover, we also come from different fields of study: journalism, design, communication, digital communication and ICT (Information-Communication Technology). Furthermore, when the teacher divide the team, they try to make balanced team according all these three criteria: nationality, gender, study field, and they also consider the roles that you want to do in the team. To conclude, this is one of the main reasons that I like my class and team.

– 5,5: is the passing mark in the Netherlands. Indeed, in the Netherlands, the marks are from 0 (actually, they will put an 0,1 instead of a zero) to 10 and not to 20 like in France. This reminds me of the Vietnamese education system, as we also have marks from 0 to 10. But our passing mark is 5 and not 5, 5 like in the Dutch system. An eight here is considered like very good, a nine is excellent, and a ten is very rare. In the same time, most of Dutch students don’t try to get a very high mark. For them, a passing mark is already very nice. I will talk about their “average culture” in another article.

– 7: it is the number of members in my team: two Dutch boys, two German girls, one Spanish boy, one Portuguese girl and me, from Vietnam. We are the largest team of the class, as the two other teams just have 6 members each :-D.

Okie, so I think you have gotten many numbers now.

But wait, talking about numbers, there is something that I heard about the city…

Ah okie, I got it, about the city’s average age: “36,4: the average age of Groningen inhabitants, making them the youngest city populations of the Netherlands. Every fifth person is a student, and over half of the population is younger than 35″. 

To be honest, this number might be appealing for Westerners, but not eloquent for me. At first, I didn’t understand why. And then, I realized that it was because Vietnam is a in-developing country and has a much younger population. Indeed, Vietnamese population’s median age is around 28. The thing which is more striking for me is that I rarely see babies and pregnant women in Groningen. Maybe this is also because Groningen is more for study than to work and live in family 🙂

Okie, now, this is truly the end of this article.

Have a nice day 🙂