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!