Virtual meeting of youth from sister cities
On March 11, students of the Institute of Foreign Languages of Petrozavodsk State University met with students and schoolchildren from the sister city of Tubingen. The meeting was held in the videoconference mode on the ZOOM platform.
This is the first of four planned meetings within the framework of the virtual bilingual round table “Tourist Karelia”, organized annually under the leadership of Associate Professor of the Department of German and French languages E.N. Vorotilina and senior lecturer of the Department of Foreign Languages of Humanities O.O. Nikolaeva. One of the initiators of the meeting was the Karelian Foundation for the Development of People’s Diplomacy, headed by N.V. Lavrushina. The meeting was moderated by Stephan Klingebiel, an expert from the Youth Department of the City Hall of Tübingen.
Young people from Petrozavodsk and Tübingen were invited to get to know each other by answering the questions of a short questionnaire. It turned out that of all the options (learn a language, get to know each other better, get to know the sights of cities, etc.), young people were most interested in the opportunity to get to know each other at the first meeting, which cannot but rejoice, because this way opens a new page of twinning relations: the new generation of Germany and Russia makes it clear – “We are interesting to each other.”
After a short presentation of the participants of the meeting, which was held in German and English, the young people themselves chose the language convenient for communication, presentations of the twin cities were demonstrated. Students of the Institute of Foreign Languages Kirill Nekrasov, Natalya Sibiryakova, Konstantin Kuznetsov and Evgeny Lebed told the representatives of Tübingen about the history and modernity of Petrozavodsk in German. The presentation was warmly received by the youth of Tübingen. Stephan Klingebiel told the meeting participants about Tübingen itself in English.
The communication of young people continued in the session rooms, where the participants of the meeting had to find the answer to the questions, “What do you have in common?” (knowledge of languages, study, hobbies) and “What places in Tübingen and Petrozavodsk would you like to visit?”. Further work will be done on the creation of videos in German and English about the sights of the sister cities.