“Entschuldigung, ”Michael Mai, 19, says “excuse me” in German as he walks through a crowd. Mai, from Shenzhen, China, has been a freshman at Leipzig University in Germany for the last 10 months.

Before Leipzig, Mai studied environmental science and engineering in Guangdong, China. He had wanted to study chemistry, but didn’t get accepted. So he decided to go abroad.

“My family members then thought that studying abroad was a better choice. Compared with going to English-speaking countries, I’d like to be somewhere to learn a new language,” Mai says.

Mai is one of about 2,700 international students, only 10 percent of whom are Chinese, at LU. And he is part of a growing number of Chinese students going abroad for education.

Because Mai didn’t speak German, which his science classes will be taught in, he is only taking language classes his first year.

“In the beginning, I really doubted that I could learn a new language without the help of another language I knew before. But it did work. Teachers have their own approaches,” he says, adding that his test scores have been high.

Mai’s new friends are mostly other international students also taking language classes. He doesn’t spend much time with the few Chinese students.

“I want to have the atmosphere to speak German. Also, I find it more interesting to have friends from all over the world than to be with several Chinese friends everyday,” he says.

Mai chose Germany based on the German reputation for being rigorous. He thought it would be a good place to study science. “Also, there’s no tuition fee for undergraduate or graduate students in Germany,” he says.

Compared to China, Mai’s lifestyle is gradually changing, he says. “Sometimes I go to parks,” he says. ”They are quiet places and I’m afraid that I won’t get used to the crowded streets in Shenzhen when I go back in July.”

Moving from a city of more than 7 million to just over 500,000 has required other adjustments as well. “Shopping malls are rarely found and I haven’t seen any karaoke here,” Mai says. “Maybe life in Leipzig will be different after I know some local friends and join student clubs or societies.”

The number of Chinese students going abroad for school increased 11 percent in 2014 to nearly 460,000 students, the majority of whom will return to China if trends continue, according to the Chinese Ministry of Education.

But Mai doesn’t know if he’ll return or not. “I went to the U.S. last winter and I really like some cities in California. Maybe I’ll try American life in the future, for further study or career,” he says.

But he prefers to focus on his present life rather than his future. “Future is something that hasn’t come, who knows it for sure?” he says. “I believe that as long as I go forward, there will be roads.”

Around 3 million Trabants were produced by East Germany until the Berlin Wall fell. Sales fell as Trabi owners abandoned their cars and the company had to stop production.

The iconic Trabant, the most common car in East Germany, was manufactured by VEB Sachsenring from 1957 to 1991, Two years after the Berlin Wall fell, the company made the last “Trabi,” marking an end to its 3-million-strong production.

Equipped with a two-stroke engine, a plastic shell and two doors, the Trabi could hold four adults and luggage space. Because of its low-cost material – the plastic was made from recycled material, such as cotton waste – the Trabi was inefficient, easy to break down, slow and polluting.

Despite its problems, the Trabi was the only vehicle choice for East Germans. And to get one cost nearly an East German’s entire annual salary and could take up to eight year to make it through the waiting list for one of the four models.

The Trabi Museum in Berlin displays cars from various years of production.

Germany has the Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW, among others, but today, the Trabi still putters the roads of Germany, as well as countries such as the US, where it has become a collector’s item, according to article by the Wall Street Journal, based on nostalgia and historical significance.

A Berlin and Dresden-based company called Trabi World, rents the colourfully painted cars for city tours and runs a Berlin Trabi museum in the afternoons not far from Checkpoint Charlie museum, on the site of the former border crossing between East Germany and West Germany.

See a Trabant photo slideshow here.

In 2010, a cross-eyed opossum named Heidi became an international star after a German tabloid featured of photo of the creature. With more than 180,000 Facebook followers and a song named after her, the beloved creature lived until the ripe old opossum age of 3 in the Leipzig Zoo.

One of the oldest zoos in Europe, The Leipzig Zoo ranks first on travel-rating service Trip Advisor among the 132 attractions in Leipzig, the largest city in the German state of Saxony. And in September this year, it will host the annual conference of the International Congress of Zookeepers.

The 67-acre zoo, almost 1.5 times larger than Victoria Park in Hong Kong, houses approximately 850 different species in six themed areas. And in 2011, the zoo had more than 2 million visitors.

“I don’t know much about animals. I ask the kids to describe the colours and the appearances of the animals,” said zoo visitor Heun, looking for a disguised green lizard known as the Asian water dragon in the full-screen terrarium with his two boys. “They give some hilarious answers such as ‘ugly’, ‘I like it’, or simply ‘I don’t like it’.”

Stefan, a visitor to the zoo, feeds the ducks bread. Feeding animals at the zoo is prohibited.

Stefan, who visited the zoo alone, tossed some bread into a pond and watched a duck take the prize, beating out two smaller ducks. “You don’t often have a chance to come to this close,” he said.

There are few cages separating animals from visitors. For the big cats, visitors view them from an open platform, the roars on the other side of a 10-metre-wide moat causing children to scream.

Every year, the animals at the zoo consume more than 210,000 kilograms of fruit and vegetables.

But no animals here are tame, evidenced by the landing of a peacock in the middle of the pathway, the standing up of a hairy black bear and the riot of a group of monkeys.

An endangered Siberian tiger roams the zoo’s “Tiger Taiga.” The zoo has housed more than 350 of the Amur tiger breed since 1957.

Involved in conservation breeding programs for more than 75 animal species, the zoo recently had to put down a sick week-old Asian-elephant calf.

Click here to see a photo slideshow of the zoo.

Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived in Leipzig, Germany for 27 years and died there, has become the calling card for the city.

But 2 kilometers southeast of the Bach Museum and St Thomas Church, where Bach worked, is an inconspicuous three-storey house dedicated to another musician: prodigy Felix Mendelssohn.

Christiane Schmidt, Concert Department Director of the Mendelssohn House, says the composer is responsible for Leipzig’s reputation as a music city.

“Without Mendelssohn, Leipzig wouldn’t be the music city it is now,” says Christiane Schmidt, the Concert Department Director of the Mendelssohn House. “Mendelssohn brought Bach’s music back to us.”

Bach’s music was frequently played during services in local churches after the composer’s death in 1750 without attendants knowing who composed it, Schmidt says. But it was Mendelssohn who revived the name Bach and brought his music to concert halls.

The 20-year-old Mendelssohn conducted Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829. This was the first time Bach’s work had been successfully performed to the public for 100 years.

Despite international acknowledgement, Mendelssohn was criticized during his time for being too old-fashioned and also conservative. Mendelssohn’s contemporaries — Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz— were far more aggressive in departure from the tradition set up by predecessors such as Bach.

But for residents of Leipzig, Mendelssohn’s contribution to the city is indelible, Schmidt says.

Mendelssohn developed the modern symphonic orchestra system when he was conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, now a world-class orchestra, and founded the first musical school in Germany: the Leipzig Conservatory.

According to the Mendelssohn biography by Peter J Mercer-Taylor, a music history scholar from the University of Minnesota, Mendelssohn tried hard to persuade the then king of Saxony to have the conservatory based in Leipzig instead of the capital city Dresden.

Mendelssohn seemed to have a partiality for Leipzig. He declined the offer of a more prominent position in Munich and was reluctant to perform his duty in Berlin assigned by the Prussian king, according to Mercer-Taylor.

In his diary, Mendelssohn wrote that people in Berlin worked for themselves, while people in Leipzig worked for the country. The open-minded bourgeoisie culture in Leipzig at that time attracted Mendelssohn a lot, Schmidt says.

A monument to Mendelssohn, erected after his early death, was removed by the Nazi forces in 1936 and his works were banned from performance and publication because of the composer’s Jewish origins.

During the time of the German Democratic Republic, the government promoted German classical music partly as a counterforce to the rising street culture. With its rich musical heritage, Leipzig was treated as an important base for the campaign.

Later, in 1989, the then conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Kurt Masur, launched citizen meetings in the concert hall as part of the negotiation with the communist government. The ensuing demonstrations in Leipzig played a remarkable role in the reunification of Germany.

Nowadays the Mendelssohn House is the only museum solely dedicated to the composer. The building, located in a quiet neighbourhood just beside the new Gewandhaus concert hall, was the home of the Mendelssohn family.

Compared to the Bach Museum, the Mendelssohn House is smaller and less visited by tourists. “Mendelssohn might be not as famous as Bach, but his music is no less great,” says Jochen Jacobi, a university student from Hamburg. Jacobi visited the museum for a school assignment.

The Mendelssohn House holds regular concerts of Mendelssohn’s music as well as by other composers, such as Mozart and Beethoven.

Concerts featuring Mendelssohn’s music are held regularly in the house. Some people unable attend the special concert on Christmas Eve, Schmidt says.

Some attendants weep in sorrow during the concert, Schmidt adds. “But after they listen to the music for a while, you can see that they are smiling.”

The monument to Mendelssohn was reconstructed in 2008. Now it stands outside the St Thomas Church where Bach once composed hundreds of cantatas and masses. Visitors coming to worship Bach pass by the statue of the man who rescued Bach from being lost to history.

See a photo slideshow of the Mendelssohn House here.

Massimo Giordano playing Don Jose clutches a murdered Carmen, played by Angelika Kirchschlager

Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” may not be the most popular opera, but it certainly tops the favorites list of diva lovers. The opera not only features a flirtatious and tempestuous love story, but its well-known melodies certainly keep you awake.

Berlin’s Deutsche Oper production is the foundation of this second largest opera house in the country. But opera, a relatively complex art form, is equal parts theatre and singing. Starring Clémentine Margaine and Elbenita Kajtazi, this “Carmen” disappointingly lacks the passion that makes this three-hour production so well loved.

Carmen is not an easy woman to figure out. Margaine’s mezzo vocals are impressive and her acting convincingly expresses both the temptress and manipulator. But, Margaine lacks Carmen’s fire. The scene of her seduction of Don José fails to drive the emotions of the house.

The role of the heartless Carmen who leads the solider Don José to suicide requires more than pure vocalism: blazing eyes, sexual allure, and most importantly, a sense of danger. Margaine was nowhere close to bringing any of these to that Thursday evening.

Despite the lack of stage presence, the singing was entertaining and well executed, and the orchestra, conducted by Jacques Lacombe, performed beautifully.

Deutsche Oper’s “Carmen” was definitely not the best I’ve ever seen, but, for 55 euros, well worth it.