During the first session of the seminar How to study culture, I was expecting to do the usual assignments and maybe prepare texts in order to be able to participate actively in the next session, but I was taught better. I quickly realized that the seminar was completely different to my initial prospects and could was much more interesting compared to other seminars which I had already attended during my master program at Giessen University. I still remember quite well the day when Prof. D. Rostek presented the pill scene from one of most amazing movies, namely Matrix. The movie stands for artifacts that we see and create, or actions we do or experience in our everyday life. This specific scene we were seeing can be referred to one of the best and most important scenes in the whole movie. It not about who plays the role, but what matters is the message behind that pill scene. In this scene Neo, the main character, is offered to decide between the blue pill and continuing to live
in a synthesized, fictional and computer-generated world or to take the red pill and joining the real world and escape from the matrix. For a while, I was not able to detect the overall coherence between the movie and our topic culture and I was wondering how we will relate the scene back to our seminar topic. Prof. D. Rostek then asked us, which pill we would choose. I chose the red pill, because I wanted to see the real world and experience it. However, there was another story behind the blue pill, which is the ability to know everything and being expert in life and about other cultures, so there would not be any problem in understanding and communicating with various people from different cultures. It was exactly this moment where I started to realize how interesting this seminar will become and how much knowledge I could gain from the seminar. Especially also in terms of reflecting my personal experiences of the German culture as someone who has another cultural background.