Thursday, July 4, 2013

Day 15 – Amazing Volunteers

We had a ton of fun today.  In class we had our last meeting with the volunteers from the Communication University.  They taught us how to paint numbers, letters, etc… with traditional paint brushes and ink.  We had so much fun learning the proper way to paint, meaning the order of how we should write Chinese characters.  It was a bit frustrating to get the characters to look how we wanted them to look, but this was an amazing learning experience. 

The volunteers have taught us so much over the last couple of weeks.  We have learned about culture, religion, politics, language, characters and phrases.  They have done such a great job.  At the end of their lesson I gave each of them a little gift, and they in return gave me a book of local culture, architecture, art, community and general life in China.  It truly is a great book, and one that I might recommend future study abroad students read prior to arriving in country.  I will treasure it always.

After our lesson we talked about our final article, and about modernism, high modernism, post-modernism and a number of other things.  In case you’re wondering what those terms mean, go ahead and google them.  We also applied theory to our experiences and talked a great deal about bringing theory down to an applicable level.

We then headed off to the cafeteria for lunch, then a group of us met to go to something called “World Park”, or what I like to call “Tiny Town”.  This is an amusement park of sorts, but it’s filled with small replicas of famous attractions around the world.  We visited a mini Eiffel Tower, Golden Gate Bridge, Big Ben, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Great Wall (yes, they made a mini replica), the Pyramids, Stonehenge, St. Peters Square and many other mini replicas.  We had a great time even though it was about 100 degrees out and incredibly sunny.  We expected it to be a little cooler than it was, but even in the heat we had a good time.

After World Park we grabbed cabs and headed home.  I’d like to say that I watched out the window in wonder of this amazing city, but I will admit that I’m so tired from going a million miles an hour that I fell asleep in the cab.  We called it a night shortly after that to relax.  Some of the students continued to work on their final performances, while others went their separate ways. 

Here is a post from Edgar Coronado

One of the main reasons that I came to China was for the Chow Mein, however, I have been surprised with so many different and delicious types of foods. The genuine Chinese food we have eaten here make the Chinese food in the U.S. seem like the Taco Bell of Mexican food, super fake and completely different than the real food.  Another great part of the food there is that restaurants serve the food family-style, and even though it is not a buffet, it is basically all-you-can-eat because they serve so much food. Even though the food is really good and plentiful here, being Americans, we are used to eating a different variety of foods. With that in mind, we have tried to find a little piece of home at places like McDonald’s and KFC, but they are not quite the same. Luckily, we found a restaurant named “Grandma’s Kitchen” which was surprisingly very good. They serve everything from American breakfasts to cheeseburgers and chicken sandwiches. Even though we finally found a good Western restaurant, this last week we have to make sure we enjoy and eat as much Chinese food as possible because we are most likely only going to be in China once!

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