School over here is truly quite different then that in Dover Sherborn. To begin, the day kicks off around 8 am and continues to 5pm, but after studying our schedules, it turns out that despite the increased day length, the students here have only an extra half-hour of classes than we do back home! The breaks and lunch time the students have are very spread out which is great for rest, hanging out, or doing homework. The classes all have no heat, so we were bundled up like a group of Eskimos in search of some place warmer! The weather has been pretty bad since we've been here, but apparently last week Hangzhou had a heatwave and we just missed it. Just our luck.
Either way, the students and faculty are outstanding and have been welcoming since we arrived on Friday. Today we attended a small welcoming ceremony put on for us by the heads of the school minus Madame Miao (she is in Beijing for meetings). After that, we toured the school and visited the school museum! That's right, the school has its own 3-4 stories dedicated to its history. The school is over 100 years old and has a great history through many violent and changing times such as the ending of the Qing Dynasty, the Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen. We had a mixed schedule of our own classes and our host sibling's classes which provided us a unique feel to the school. This is a great schedule because it welcomes us into the daily life of a student while at the same time providing the rest of us our own private classes for Chinese and the arts.
At 11:30, we had our first lunch, and what a lunch it was! We had a good combo of Western style food mixed with Chinese food. Not to mention we also had dessert first! When we were all full, we headed out to our next class. We also met our student guide (just like Bruce for Team China last year). His name is Liam and his Chinese name is Li Han Bao. He is a great guy and has applied to twelve American schools and already been accepted into two. He told us that when he was younger his father always joked around calling him hamburger or han bao bao in Chinese because of his name. We all had a good laugh from that and his sense of humor is great! He ended up being our Chinese teacher today because the actual teacher was teaching us all a little too fast and too much, but when Liam stepped in, he really helped us improve and review our Chinese.
For the last two periods of the day we followed our classmates around for just a little longer. Around 4 pm we all had P.E togehter and played some awesome rounds of ping pong. I have never seen more people good at ping pong per capita than here in China! I went against my host brother Chen Yifan (Charlie) and Alaina's host sister as well. I had a friendly match with Cassie as well, which was nice seeing how we are both similarly skilled.
At this point, the weather outside was very rainy and cold so we all left as early as we could. In China, the traffic is absolutely horrible, and when it rains out, it is that much worse. What generally took 15-20 minutes to get to school took us over an hour to get back home. Not a fun car ride except for listening to some nice jazz along the way. Once home, Charlie and I did our homework while his parents made dinner, which was very good. We had sweet and sour pork, tofu, and a really odd, but good, lettuce. As I finish this blog now, Charlie is finishing his homework as well, so we must get to sleep soon for another day tomorrow.
Goodnight America and keep checking in.
No comments:
Post a Comment