This summer, 10 students and two faculty members are traveling to China to enhance their Chinese language skills while experiencing the country’s vast and diverse cultural landscape. Please enjoy this next blog post below from Oscar ’26 where he reflects on a day of learning about China’s digital landscape, followed by a hands-on ceramics workshop where painting, pottery, and bracelet-making brought art and culture to life.
To start off Friday, I enjoyed steamed buns and scrambled eggs before making the rainy trek to the University. Today was the start of a new unit, so we learned a lot of new vocabulary about apps, as well as the various nuances and inside details of China’s social media and outside internet policy. Our teacher explained how accessing foreign websites was prohibited in China, and that some people used illegal VPNs to use American websites like Netflix, Snapchat and more. After this, we ate a quick lunch at the cafeteria before getting on the bus to what might be one of the most anticipated activities of the trip; the ceramics museum. After admiring the beautifully crafted sculptures and pottery on display and a brief conversation about zodiac animals and the meaning behind them, we got to work. The museum offered painting, ceramic sculpting on an authentic pottery wheel and bracelet making. We started with painting with traditional Chinese paint. We each completed our plates and set them aside to dry. It was an amazing experience to feel the clay being shaped under my hand, even if I was never 100 percent sure what the instructors were telling me to do. In the end, I think my bowl was pretty good. We finished up with bracelet making, picking out from a wide variety of beads to put on. After finishing our arts and crafts, we headed back to the university before turning in early in preparation for our day trip early tomorrow morning.
