nwasianweekly.com
Sept. 2, 2006

Photos provided by Ronni Lee

The author makes friends with one of the Friendlies, the official mascots of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

By Ronni Lee
For the Northwest Asian Weekly

Getting to study abroad in China this summer was a great chance for me and nine other students. This could only happen because we are in a program called One World Now. One World Now is a program that allows participants to study abroad in the summer in China or Morocco. Throughout the 2005-2006 school year, we took Mandarin classes twice a week after school to help prepare us for our study abroad trip. We went with three teachers who were there to look after us. We went to four different places: Beijing, Kunming, Lijiang, and Shanghai.

Near Beijing we got the chance to climb the Great Wall and sleep in the guard tower. While on the Great Wall, we had an educational time learning about the wall. We learned about how it was built and that there were many people who died while building the wall.

It was fascinating to see how the wall was built at a time when there was no machinery to help with the labor.

We also went to the Forbidden City, where we saw many different exhibits.

In Kunming we had Mandarin classes in the morning each day and we stayed with host-families instead of in hotels. There were two students assigned to one host-family. After our morning classes, we would spend our afternoons with the three teachers and eat lunch together and go on outings. In the evening, we would return from our outing and go home to our host-family. On days we had field trips to places in the afternoon, we would invite our host-sister or host-brother to come join us if they could. We spent time with our host parents in the evening because that’s when they return home from work. I had a wonderful time with my host-family. It was great.

All of our host-families were very nice to us and they enjoyed our company. Even though we did have a little language barrier between all of the students and the host-families, it worked out in the end. The host-families would try to talk to us in English so we could understand them better and they could practice their English. We would teach them some new words and correct their grammar mistakes, and in return they taught us some Mandarin words and phrases. After a couple of days, we got to learn more Mandarin and we could talk to our host-families without as much trouble as before. They encouraged us to visit them again whenever we could. We all enjoyed staying with our host-families for ten days and were very sad to leave them.
In Lijiang we did our community service by planting trees. We also had a scavenger hunt. We planted the trees to help stop erosion from getting worsening each year because of the rain. Hopefully the trees will grow big and strong and stop the erosion. The scavenger hunt was beneficial to us because we got time to shop and use our Mandarin skills to ask where things were. We got to know Old Town pretty well by the end of the scavenger hunt.

Shanghai is one of the biggest cities that we visited. Shanghai reminded all of us of Downtown Seattle because there are big buildings, big shopping malls and, of course, a lot of people. We met some post high school students who showed us the biggest high school in Shanghai. They also showed us their apartments so that we could get a good idea of an average apartment. Shanghai consists of many apartment buildings and hardly any houses. On our last night in Shanghai, we took a boat cruise and went last minute shopping for our friends back home. At night, most of the buildings are lit and it was a wonderful sight to see from the boat.

In the end, we all enjoyed the trip. We all had fun and got to know each other better. It was a fantastic and educational way to spend our summer together.

Ronni Lee can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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