Dear Me,
I hope you had a good time in China
and have come back with many souvenirs and stories to share. Hopefully nothing
scary happened, and hopefully you didn’t get sick from any crazy food you may
have tried. By now you should be able to converse with other native mandarin
speakers. And you should have met many people from around the world who you
have added to your friends list. You should have done well in all of your
classes, and hopefully this note doesn’t make you upset in case any of the
above is not true.
Now is too soon to tell where all you
have been, but by the time you get this you will have been traveling around
Asia like a pro; collecting information and knowledge that will make you a
better-rounded person for the future. Maybe you wrote in your blog regularly so
that others could keep up with your journey too, and posted pictures so they
can see it as you see it. By the end of your time, no matter how good or bad it
was; I hope that you will still be a study abroad advocate and will still want
to travel the rest of the world.
Writing this letter to you now, I am
on the couch in my house at Tech. We are all packing and getting ready for
finals, Clay is even staying with you for the week before we make the 7 hour
drive/move back home. I cannot possibly predict what all you will have
experienced by the time you read this, or what you have gone through, but
hopefully it will have made you a stronger, more independent person. I have to
go, but know that I can’t wait to be where you are soon.
-Amanda
I didn't get to travel as much as I would have liked to. This program, although great, is very intensive. I probably wouldn't have chosen this program had I known that we would have Chinese 4 times a week for 3 hours at a time. Coupled with our other mandatory classes. We have Wednesdays off, but it would have been more beneficial to have Friday's off instead. And another thing that bothers me about the program is that they check attendance to make sure you are in class. We are all Juniors in college, I believe we are old enough to make decisions about whether or not we can skip a class. Everyone knows that it is not advised to skip class, but it is a choice we make. To have to explain that gets annoying. And if my grades aren't suffering, obviously me missing a couple of classes isn't going to harm me in the long run. (end of rant)
Anyways... this program is intensive, you have to take at least 2 business classes, and Chinese 4 times a week. It gets old. really fast... I have been in China for 4 months and haven't seen even a fourth of the country or cities. Going to Beijing wasn't in the program, so you have to go to Beijing during your own independent travel week. Then you will have about half a week to explore the rest of China.
Places I would have loved to seen:
1) Xi'an
2) Chengdu (PANDAS!)
3) Yunnan Provence (this is in inland China close to India)
4) Mongolia
5) Climb Mt. Huangshan
6) Visit areas north of Beijing
That's only in China, as you know we are within hours (via plane) to Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. I would have loved to visit these places as well.
I am still an advocate for study abroad, I just should have better looked into programs before I came. I get jealous when I hear stories from others studying abroad in other countries and they are just visiting so many cool areas. I am not saying I haven't been fortunate, or that I am in any way ungrateful for this experience... I just expected more than what I have gotten.
I have been fortunate enough to never get food poisoning while in China, can't say the same for some of my classmates though. I have never truly been sick while here, save for a common cold. The school is right next to a subway station, so traveling around Shanghai has been convenient. And I can almost always find what I need amongst the back street people.
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