We have been here for almost a month now and we now have an idea of the language and Chinese culture. In our practical training the cultural differences are quite big. We don’t understand their language and they don’t understand English. Especially communicating with the patients and their relatives is extremely hard, almost impossible. The nurses speak to patients like in Finland, using not too formal language. The younger nurses have to be very respectful to the older nurses and the patients too. The patients respect doctors a lot and they speak to them as they were in a very high position, almost like God. In China it’s normal to slap each other to get attention. They don’t consider it to be rude like in Finland. The nurses slap each other and us too! Not hard of course.

We thought that the nurse-patient relationship would be different from Finland but it really isn’t.  Of course it’s hard to say what the nurse and the patient are talking about with each other because of the language, but we would say that it seem similar to our country. The nurses speak directly to the patients and aren’t so afraid that the patient would be offended. In Finland the nurses are more careful of what they say to the patients. We think that there aren’t that many things you can’t talk straight with the patient. For example in a patient room there were three nurses and us and one nurse asked the patient some questions about intimate things and the patient answered without embarrassment. In Finland patients would probably be ashamed or angry if there were five persons listening. It also depends on a patient. Our classmate Emmi was also in the patient room and she translated the conversation for us. She has lived in Beijing for two and a half years so she is pretty good in Chinese. She has been very nice and translated us a lot of things here in Shanghai. It would be hard to travel by bus if she hadn’t written us the names of the buses in Chinese.

We are going to Beijing tomorrow and we’ll be back in Shanghai on Wednesday or Thursday. It’s a tomb-sweeping day here from Monday to Wednesday (a national holiday) so it’s possible to travel. We’ll tell you about the trip when we come back. 

Sightseeing at the Bund in Shanghai.