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More China

by Julia :: Friday March 24, 2006

It is true that I had already been to China last summer. It is also true that I have seen a sufficient amount of monumental architecture. I would say that I had achieved a greater understanding of the country. Yet it is this spring break trip that I truly got to observe dynamics of China, from the Great Wall to Shangri-la.

The first week, our group, mostly the Thacher students who are currently taking Chinese, stayed in Beijing and Chengdu. In Beijing, we not only hiked the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, and the Forbidden City, but also visited our SYA (School Year Abroad) friends. Every single one of them was very fluent in Chinese now and is enjoying the strikingly different environment. Chengdu is famous for tea and pandas; we drank a lot of different types of tea, and took way too many pictures of cute baby pandas.

In Chengdu, now known as Shangri-la, we visited the Tibetan village and temple, which revealed a whole different dimension of China. Most parents send their boys to the temple for education, but later the young men decide whether to stay or come out to get married and have a family. There were a lot of monks, from a little boy who was not even 5 yet to more respectable old monks, but the general atmosphere was that of an all-boy boarding school. Though wrapped in sacred scarlet robes, they were, when not chanting, still running around squirting water at one another!

The last three days, we spent our enjoyable time on the beach of Hai nan, an island that resembles Hawaii. Interestingly, the restaurant we went for dinner had a sea food market on the first floor, so that customers could choose what they want to eat. Really good sea food—I will never forget that.

The trip ended rather too quickly. I enjoyed every moment in China, and I would like to thank our teacher, Mr. Yan, for organizing such an unforgettable trip. Certainly it convinced me to take a year off sometime during my college year to explore China and study Chinese!

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