• Share it :

One week in...

China day in the life exploring 厦门 Friends NSLI-Y 厦门 One week done, 5 more to go.

They also threw in a surprise: classes every single day. Yes that's right, Sunday through Sunday. It's crazy, this program is so laid out with every single minute scheduled that it is starting to get boring really quick. People are getting annoyed and frustrated really easily because they are not used to this strick of a schedule. Everyday we have Chinese class from 9-12 which is followed by an hour and a half for lunch and leisure time which almost everyone used to study for a quiz or nap. Next is Dr. Chen's culture lesson. So far we have been talking about Confucianism but today we started actually talking about Chinese culture. Following that is my favorite, interest groups. Today started new interest groups, Chinese western dancing but our teacher wasn't here today so we sung, very off key, a Chinese song instead. Then my least favorite, tutoring. All the other kids, in higher levels, love tutor time because they can talk to the tutors I'm Chinese but I don't know enough to carry on a conversation, yet. 

After classes and dinner we all went to a piano concert at one of 厦门大学 (Xiamen) building. It was a beautiful stadium. The concert was endless. The man, who was part of the first orchestra to tour China, played 3 beautiful songs before intermission. After the 10 minute intermission, he played another set that seemed like it would never last. It sounded beautiful but my only request would be to shorten the program.

Skylar, me, and Merrick

The piano hall 

During intermission 

Today was another normal day except we had our first community service activity: picking up trash around 厦门大学 campus. It was actually fun because they made it into a competition. During our trip, they encourage us to "strive for excellence". By using a point system they create competitions to hype us up. Then at the end of every week, they announce the "team of the week" with the most points. And guess what the prize is? TO LEAVE CAMPUS AND GO SHOPPING!!! Orange Team ( 橙队 ) came in second (by 3 points) last week but since there was a big typhoon that was going to hit Xiamen that night, the winning group (team 3) is going shopping this Friday with the next winning team, which will hopefully be us.

Anyways back to our Green Clean Up. We didn't collect the most amount of trash so we didn't get points but we didn't see a lady collecting water bottles to earn money so we gave her all of the water bottles that we had found, which was more than a trash bag full. It was amazing helping someone else out. I guess it is true when they say, "One man's trash is another man's treasure."

Spotted cat (on top) is the pregnant one

After clean up we had dinner which was nothing special except now, on weekends, we can go downstairs to the forbidden part of the cafeteria and get "make your own noodles" which taste heavenly. Once dinner was over, my favorite teacher, 杨老师, fed the wild cats with me. She had some left over fish and chicken that she gave them. Apparently she is not only fluent in Chinese and English, but also Cat. Who knew?!?! She would call out "meowwww" and all the cats would huddle around her waiting for food. I learned that one of the wild cats is pregnant and will most likely give birth while we are still here. Can't wait!!!