Homestays - today the studens visited their chinese counterparts. They all went well and everyone had a great time. They did a variety of activities - such as shopping, walking in gardens, vsiting a famous bridge, eating lunch with the family, playing badminton, making dumplings, doing calligraphy and exchanging presents and talking. Everyone is exhausted so the diary will follow tomorrow.
Here is what Ruth thought about her homestay -
Yesterday we touched the true China…and all fell in love! I think it is fair to say that we were all a little apprehensive and nervous about our prospective visits with Chinese families but I can now happily tell you that this was in no way necessary.
Huang Shining or Hannah as we called her is a small, smiley and slightly shy Chinese girl who welcomed both myself and Lynsey Kirk into her home and her daily life for a day. After meeting us at school Hannah and her father took us to the supermarket – complete with pigs hooves and chicken feet for the more adventurous shoppers – to buy some dumplings for our lunch, before we arrived at her school and met up with her friends. One thing that has surprised me the most here in
China
, and yesterday, was how welcoming the people are, always happy to see you and willing to make you feel at home. Myself and Lynsey discovered a very similar daily life to our own at home as we sat with these 6 girls and laughed, ate junk food and played games that were so close to our life in Scotlandthat we were both surprised. The day as a whole turned out to be the opposite to what we expected. Stereotyping, we expected a family worse-off than our own, and a life that differed completely from ours, instead we were met with a gigantic flat screen TV and a life that mirrored ours almost completely. A visit to the famous Marco Polo bridge – known for its 500 carved stone lions, each one different – and a trip to a beautiful lake in old town Beijing, left us shattered by the end of the day but glad to have made new friends and discovered a side to China that so few people get to see! This experience, though not very well explained in this rather rushed attempt at a blog, I think will stay with us forever as we discovered a China that we didn’t expect but fell in love with instantly. A huge thank you to Hannah, her friends and her family for putting up with us for a day and making us part of their family, I wish we could have had the chance to do the same to them.
Other students thoughts:
This made me cry Ruth, you are obviously having an amazing experience ,
I feel as if I'm with you , with all the photos and news , thank you
Heather
Posted by: heather | July 24, 2006 at 11:01 AM