Wittenborg's International Students Bridge Cultural Gap While Enjoying Great Food at Chinese Cuisine EveningWhat is the quickest way for international students to connect with each other? Over a great meal of course! The Chinese student organization ACSSNL certainly understood this logic when they arranged a Chinese Cuisine Evening with the help of Wittenborg University this week. Even Wittenborg's Chair of the Executive Board, Peter Birdsall, popped in!

The ACSSNL's Apeldoorn branch is led by Wittenborg students. It is the largest volunteer organization representing Chinese students and scholars in the Netherlands and funded by the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands. The chairman of the Apeldoorn branch is Muxiang Liao, who is also a Wittenborg student.

More than 40 students and members of ACSSNL showed up for the event which was hosted at the Aventus Brasserie Intermezzo in Apeldoorn. The latter kindly made their facilities available. Here guests enjoyed a wide variety of food, including China's most popular winter dish, the "Hotpot", prepared by Chef Leo and his team. This included not only traditional food which generated from Sichuan Cuisine, Shandong Cuisine, Jiangsu Cuisine and Hunan Cuisine, but also elaborate creative cuisine designs that based on theory of both eastern and western styles. "In China, different cuisine are distinguished from each other by way of the different areas they originated from," Liao said. "For instance, Cuisine at the western part of China is different from eastern styles in terms of cooking style, seasoning and method."
Wittenborg's office manager, Eva van Herel, said a cross-section of students attended, from Asia to Africa and Europe, bonding at the table and trying out new food. "It was great to see. The chef also made an effort to explain every dish carefully and non-Chinese students enthusiastically tried to eat with chopsticks."