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 Ava ’27 as she shares a joyful day filled with laughter, language learning, and karaoke as the group nears the end of their Shanghai stay.
侬好！
We’re on our last week in 上海 and everyone is trying to soak up our final moments with our host families and class.
Upon our arrival at school, Oscar, Ella, and I found three bottles of “Scream” on our desk. For some context-the other day Ella had poked a hole into the lid of her bottle and would squirt the water into her mouth which Oscar and I preceded to mimic. 宋老师 told us about “Scream” since it has a squirt cap and the next day (today) we were pleasantly surprised to find it on our desk.
After class, which was spent learning new vocab in preparation for our final video project, we all headed to lunch to meet up with the other class.
When we arrived back at school we walked as a group over to Global Harbor (the mall close to campus) and navigated towards the back for our afternoon activity: Karaoke! After many failed attempts at singing Chinese songs, a beautiful duet with Brandon and Mrs. Kelly, a sus video of 小苹果, and the entire group singing we transitioned to English songs. However, we discovered a challenge-finding songs was almost impossible as we had no clue how to properly search for them. We overcame this issue and ended up singing our hearts out to various ABBA songs, Cardi B, and Lana Del Rey. Afterwards we all made our way home to spend more time with our families and called it a night.
As the trip begins to come to an end I reflect on all I’ve learnt not only from class but the cultural and language lessons from my host family. While I’m going to miss them so much, I’m getting increasingly more excited to see my family back home.
Puss o Kram,
Avis ❤️
