Homestay

Today, we spent the entire day with Chinese families! A few students and (sometimes) a student ambassador/translator were designated one family to spend the day with. I got to spend the day with Chris (student ambassador) and Maggie (UIC student), and the family consisted of grandma, mom and dad, son and daughter, and cousin. Admittedly, I was a bit disappointed at first because everyone was paired up with at least one other student or student ambassador. With this design, the students would naturally gravitate towards each other or towards the student ambassador, rather than towards the family. Furthermore, we only got one day with the family, which resulted in a lot of cool activities, but I feel like a full-weekend homestay could have made a more significant impact on our understandings of the culture.

Regardless, I had a great time. My host family took us to do calligraphy (specifically drawing the characters for “dragon” and “hundred”). After that, we went home for lunch, and after some arts and crafts, we went to a fitness dance class. The building housing this class is pretty cool. It’s an entire building dedicated to piano lessons (imagine 2 floors consisting of about 60 pianos, with 2 rooms of 10 pianos each, and all other pianos getting a dedicated sound-proofed room), with a single room designated for dance. The dance class was a really fun workout, but it was cool just to see the building and several really young piano players.