If you’ve read the previous posts then you probably know what our average “school day” is. Regardless, I will tell you how today started. Four knocks on my bedroom door woke me up and initiated the daily routine of choosing my clothes which usually includes the blue and white school uniform jacket that I was given a few days after arriving here at Hangzhou. A shower later I hopped in my host dad’s car with breakfast in hand and then fell asleep for the one hour and ten minutes it takes us to get there. We usually take the back gate into school grounds. Since this high school is obviously a city there are always two students with red sashes standing on either side of the gate to help filter out people who aren’t students and are trying to enter the campus.
After we pass the prying eyes of the gate guards my host brother Paul and I part ways and I meander towards room 209 where the school staff have essentially set up a lounge in a classroom, complete with coffee, Coke, water, and a bowl of assorted snacks and candy. I then wait there and listen to music until all five of us have arrived and then at about 9:30 we go to whatever class the school had planned for us. Today it was gym, more specifically Tai Chi, where we learned more Tai Chi moves that built on the previous set we had learned. Mrs. Lockrow seemed to be having a hard time because she missed the last session so she spent the hour longing to go dance with the schoolgirls in the gym. As difficult as it was to learn what we did today in Tai Chi it’s a strangely relaxing activity.
After gym/Tai Chi we had lunch. For some reason the school decided years and years ago that every delegation from Dover-Sherborn High School must eat in a separate room in the cafeteria with food personally prepared by a chef. Now I’m not saying I don’t greatly appreciate this gesture but I just feel odd not eating with the rest of the school as this is an exchange to learn about the school. When we finished our lunches/weird conversations we made our way over to this odd silver vehicle that had the seating capacity of an SUV but it was more like a minivan with a lower roof. This van-like thing brought us to the Hangzhou tea museum and plantations. Endless seas of growing tea surrounded the tea museum and well placed bodies of water held bundles of coy fish. Inside the museum there where exhibits on the history of tea, the making of tea, the curing process, and basically everything you would need to know on tea. There are many different kinds of green tea and Hangzhou is home base for a kind of green tea called Long Jing. After leaving the museum, we entered the rows and rows of tea bushes that were the source of the famous Long Jing tea. After that we scrunched back into the van-thingy and returned to our mini-lounge at the high school and watched Zero Dark Thirty until our host siblings came and collected us.
That’s about all we did today but there is one last thing that I must mention about going home in China. As the entire purpose of this trip is to learn about the culture, I feel that I’m obligated to tell you readers something culturally different on every one of my blog posts. Here in China, when the city bus arrives you don’t calmly shuffle onto the bus and put in your fare; you all sprint to the point where the door of the bus stops and compress into the doorway as if you were going to get your head chopped off if you didn’t make it onto the bus. I’m assuming people do this here because there are more people than can fit on one bus. Just a note on culture to leave with you guys until my next post.
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