I had intended on writing this blog while I was in China, however, due to the "Great China Firewall," limited access to the internet, and our packed schedule, I was not able to. This will be the first posting of several sharing my experience in China.
The China Study Tour consisted of 22 of us. We had four teachers/chaperones to 17 students, all are Hmong students. Seven were from my Hmong class, six from the Chinese class, and four from the Hmong class at Harding High School. The first part of the trip consisted of us flying from MSP to SEA (Seattle) before flying out to PEK (Beijing, China). For most of our students, this was their first flight ever. Even more importantly, this was their first time being away from home. It was a big deal for them. The flight from SEA to PEK was extremely long, at almost 13 hours and all I heard was constant complaining from my students about how long and uncomfortable the flight was.
We landed in Beijing at night, grabbed our luggage, went through customs, hopped on our coach bus, and went out for dinner before checking into our hotel very late at night. Beijing is crazy, but more on that later. Below are some images from that very first night. The most interesting and shocking thing happened this night. Going through customs, and having to line up in the foreigner section. Not that there is anything unusual or strange about it, it's an experience that you don't go through every day. Here at home in America, we don't think much about being a foreigner or being treated like one. It's something that we, as Americans, take for granted each day. Also, the fact that I am Hmong and resemble very closely to a Chinese person, I felt like I got the Chinese treatment here and quickly learned that I have to tell everyone I am a "foreigner," as everywhere we went from this moment on, I looked like a Chinese person and would be treated like one. Everyone spoke Chinese to me, greeted me in Chinese, came up to ask me questions, and then laughed at me when I told them I was a foreigner and spoke only English.
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Flying into Beijing at night. The "fog," I would later learn was not indeed fog, but the air pollution in China. Almost everyone walked around with face mask on during the day, due to the poor air quality here in Beijing.
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Customs check at the airport in Beijing. We all had to line up in the "Foreigners" section.
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This was our coach bus in Beijing. We spent many hours on here learning about Beijing from our tour guide, napping, and resting as we traveled all over Beijing for the first couple of days.
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Where we went to for dinner at about 9pm that night. Most restaurants were closed by now, and this was one of the few 24 hours restaurants opened in the area.
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Our very first meal in China. More to come about the food later, but we quickly realized the Chinese were all about the vegetables, including greens, eggplants, bell peppers, and especially tofu. They also drink lots of tea, and I noticed no water right away. More on that later. Very little meat...
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