Multi-Cultural City, Leicester!

Last week, I had a chance to talk about my university life in England and the city, Leicester, to my students in Japan. Today, I would like to introduce my lecture talk here. The title of my lecture is "Multi-Cultural City, Leicester".

Well, about 10 years ago, from 1999 to 2002, I had a chance to study in England at the University of Leicester. It was a very interesting experience for me because I met lots of international students from different countries.

Usually, there are many foreign students in British universities. For example, at Leicester University in the School of Education where I studied I had about 20 classmates, more than half of whom were international students: 10 students from Turkey, 5 from Taiwan, 1 from Malaysia, 1 from Japan – me – and only 3 including John were English.

Next, I would like to introduce Leicester. Well, what is your image of English people? Before I went to Leicester, my image of English people was that they all had blond hair and blue eyes. But I realized that the image was not exactly right – John has blue eyes but no hair at all!

Actually, there were various types of people living in Leicester. According to the statistics, 30 percent of them are originally from India, 20 percent are black people called Afro-Caribbean and only 50 percent are white people. As there is a large Indian community, you can see lots of curry restaurants in the city.

Finally, I am going to talk about international marriage. I think that marriages between different nationalities are more common in England than in Japan. For example, I know a couple whose husband is Anglo-Indian and his wife who is white Anglo-Saxon. John and I got married in Leicester in 2002 in this multi-cultural environment.

We had a wedding at a small Christian church near his parents’ house. We had many Turkish, Chinese and Taiwanese guests from our university. Also, neighbours living near the church attended because seeing a Japanese bride like me was rare for them. Lots of multi-cultural people celebrated our marriage, so we were very happy.