Shanghai Trip

After our Beijing trip, we took a bullet train traveling at 300 km/h to Shanghai from Beijing for our final leg of the program. I have included some pictures from our visit to Shanghai.

The NSLI-Y program has truly been an exceptional experience, learning Chinese, visiting so many places, and understanding Chinese culture and history. I have never spent more than 3 weeks away from home, so this was definitely a life-changing experience for me. The people I met on this trip motivated me to learn and experience everything all the way. I hope to keep in touch with them because they were as interested in the Chinese language and history as I was. I will also definitely keep in touch with my host family, especially my host brother, because I learned so much about Chinese families and way of life from that experience – such as you do laundry every day, and you should always wear slippers （拖鞋）in the house etc.

All in all, I am very unlikely to ever get an experience like this ever again, and I am truly grateful for it. What a summer!

子弹火车 (Bullet train)

Shanghai  World Financial Center (9th tallest building in the world at 1,614ft). Incidentally, the 2nd tallest building in the world (Shanghai Tower) is also located in Shanghai – unfortunately, it was being renovated and not open to visitors. The World Financial Center was closed when we got there but we managed to get in – not telling how!

外滩 (The Bund in Shanghai)

佛像寺庙  (Jade Buddha temple)杂技表演 （Shanghai Acrobatics Show)

东方明珠塔 (Oriental Pearl Tower)

上海市区打算博物馆 (Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center)

Beijing Trip

The Beijing trip during our NSLI-Y last week was purely for sightseeing, and below are a few pictures of the many breathtaking places we visited!

鸟巢(Bird’s Nest-Beijing’s 2008 National Olympic Stadium)

水立方(Beijing’s National Aquatic Center 2008 Olympics)

长城 (Great Wall of China at Mutianyu)

北京歌剧院（Beijing Opera House)

紫禁城 (The Forbidden City)

Goodbye Xiamen!

Our 5-week immersion learning program in Xiamen has finally come to a close. We leave for Beijing and Shanghai on our last week for excursions and sightseeing.
This experience happens only once in a lifetime, and I am extremely grateful to the US State Department for having given me this opportunity.  However, unless I continue to study and take courses in Mandarin and Chinese culture in the future, all this valuable experience could potentially go to waste in the long run, and that is why I plan to continue taking Mandarin courses in my high school.

The first thing I understood during the trip was that it wasn’t all about learning Mandarin and trying to become fluent in it. It is so much more than that! In these five weeks, I realized that it was more about bridging different cultures and trying to understand one another. All that means is that I was in China not simply to learn Mandarin, but to engage with the Chinese students, to experience Chinese food on a daily basis, to experience what it is like to live with a Chinese host family for 2 weeks and try to communicate with them, to learn about Chinese history while at the same time experiencing it during the various cultural excursions, to buy Chinese gifts for your family back home, and so much more. At the end of this trip, I may not be an expert on Chinese culture, I may not be able to talk in Mandarin as fluently as I should, I may not even be able to use chopsticks correctly, but it doesn’t matter because at the end of this trip, there is a part of me that is Chinese. It is now instinctive for me to reply in Mandarin when someone asks me a question. I may not know a lot about Chinese history but I understand its essence as I have experienced it first-hand, and can explain it.

NSLI-Y is a 6-week summer program whose objective is to immerse students in the Chinese culture and language, and it has definitely fulfilled its job as far as I am concerned! Thank you NSLI-Y!

Last Weekend with my Host Family

After classes, classes, and more classes, Sunday finally arrived! Similar to last Sunday, we were free to spend the entire day with our host families (without any classes, of course). Today my host Mom taught me how to make dumplings – so William and I spent an hour with Mom making dumplings.

Here are the steps if you want to make them yourself:

• Take a flat, round piece of dough
•  Put a decent amount of filling (pork mixed in with a type of tomato salad) on the dough
• Wrap the filling using the dough, and use water to seal the edges of the dough
• They are ready to be cooked!

Unfortunately since the dumplings contained pork, I could not eat them. After our cooking adventure, we saw Legend of Tarzan in a nearby movie theater. The movie was in English, but I tried my best to read the Chinese subtitles. After the movie, we went to an amusement park and I went on a cool ride in which you controlled the speed of a car on a long slide. The first few times I came down the slide in a controlled fashion, but the last time I went as fast as possible and it was so much fun!

After a long and exhausting day, my family took me out to the only Indian restaurant in Xiamen – “Indiano John’s Samrat” (ranked #2 out of 1456 restaurants in Xiamen, according to TripAdvisor) where I ordered some naan and enjoyed watching my family try out spicy Indian food for the first time. Back at home, my brother helped me with my homework, which was to learn, understand, and be able to use Chinese proverbs such as “It is easy to do something, but hard to do it well,” or “It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, you must keep trying”.  A fun day with a lot of cool new experiences, as I enter my final week here in Xiamen.

My host family has made a lot of effort to make me feel at home and satisfy my every wish. They are really very sweet and generous and I will be forever grateful to their hospitality. A wave of sadness came over me when I realized that I will be leaving my host family this Friday. I am really going to miss them very much!

 

Spending Time with my Host Family!

This Sunday my host brother, his friend, Leo, and I spent our free day exploring 曾厝安路 (Zhengcuoan Road) and 中山路 （Zhongshan Road). Leo talked about his school, his dreams and aspirations (he wants to go to 清华大学 (Qinghua University), and his basketball interests. Incidentally, China play the US the next day, and he said it is a win if China lose by less than 50 points! William, my host brother, gave me some really cool sunglasses (photograph attached) for the blistering sun. After exploring for 3 hours or so, we went to a stir fry restaurant and took a subway back home. Yesterday, we were visited by a world renowned painter in the province of 福建 (Fujian) who drew some unreal paintings, like the one shown below.

Meeting my Host Family!

Today, after finishing our OPI interviews, I finally got to meet my host family. My host family is small and sweet – Dad, Mom, and a 17-year old brother, William. The host family’s apartment is around 20 minutes away from Xiamen University. Everyone was very nice to me, and we chatted a little in Mandarin before eating dinner. During dinner, I gave my family presents I had brought from the US and explained the significance of each one. Given that I am from Boston, I presented them with Red Sox baseball caps. Tim Kilduff (former race director for the Boston Marathon) had generously given me posters celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Boston Marathon – my host family really liked this present. After dinner, they showed me to my room. Btw, it is a great coincidence that my brother and I like the same football club, Bayern Munich!

I am looking forward to spending the next 2 weeks with my host family, getting to know them and improving my Mandarin. I think they are as excited as I am to share and enjoy what should be a wonderful experience!

With my host mother

With my host brother, William

Yummy dinner!

With my host Dad and brother, William

NSLI-Y Week 2 Overview

Week 2 has just come to a close, and there is only one more week before we move in with our host families! I have learned a lot so far, but living with my host family for 2 weeks will definitely enhance my knowledge and insight.

It has been a lot of studying and reviewing material, but the classes make you speak up and pay attention. The interest groups have also been a lot of fun. I learned how to play Chinese chess, and we had a guest graduate student visit our class to teach us how to sing some Chinese songs. Last Sunday, however, we were in for a real treat as we celebrated four students’ birthdays for the month of July. The cake was 很好吃！After that, we went to our second music concert, featuring the 10th anniversary concert of the Youth Orchestra of Xiamen Foreign Language School. The performance included both current students and alumni who rejoined their high school orchestra especially for this occasion. The orchestra, which has won both national and international awards, played an excellent and exciting concert consisting of both Western Classical and Chinese pieces. It was very emotional in the end, as many alumni would be leaving Xiamen after this academic year.

I am excited to find out what our final week in the dorms has to offer!

Trips to XFLS and Quanzhou

Aside from the regular classes and interest group activities, we have also taken a couple of day trips. Two days ago, we visited the Xiamen Foreign Language School during its Open Day. The kids studying there are among the smartest students across the entire country, and their English is impeccable. They gave us a tour of their beautiful campus.

The next day, we visited the ancient city of Quanzhou, which was once a prosperous port city at the start of the ancient Maritime Silk Road. Quanzhou is famous for harboring  Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism with little or no conflict at all. Quanzhou was much more developed and advanced than its neighboring cities in part due to its religious tolerance.

Today, we studied for an upcoming OPI test (Oral Proficiency Interview) and experienced our first immersion day, where you had to speak Chinese for the entire day. It was difficult but it definitely helped my confidence in speaking – as I am now able to start fluent conversations with the students in the University. In the evening, we had another Green Drive project, this time picking up fallen bikes all across the Xiamen University campus.

 

NSLI-Y Week 1 Overview

The first week of this immersive, 6-week program is over and it has been a lot of fun. Aside from learning new Mandarin vocabulary, working on grammar, writing characters, and studying Chinese culture in the class we have also had fun during our recreational time. We learnt martial arts and tai chi from a graduate student. We anticipated a super-typhoon that barely hit us, leading to some heavy rain. We went to a music concert which featured wonderful piano solos from Daniel Epstein, and finally we picked up trash on the Xiamen University Campus as part of a community service project and had a competition to see who could collect the most trash.

All in all, this week has been fantastic, and I can’t wait for more!

First Day of Classes

Today was the first day of classes. It typically begins with a morning Chinese class from 9-11:50 AM, but today it was shortened so that we could have an orientation session. The staff introduced all the details of the program during the session. They told us that Xiamen University is one of the best schools in China.

After lunch,  we had culture class and we were also given readings about China’s landmass and geography – we were going to be quizzed the next day. Finally, we had afternoon classes, followed by tutor groups which is like study hall time back in the US. In my free time later during the day, I learned how to play Chinese Chess (Xiangqi), which is very different from regular chess. It was an exciting day and I am excited to learn as much as I can!

Below are pictures from yesterday’s 4th of July holiday excursion: