Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
This is
a very unusual opportunity
to study Chinese history
and some of the places where it happened.
This helps bring
one hopes
the things that you read about in books and hear about in lectures
uh...
more concrete more palpable
more memorable
more meaningful.
So the class is a
four-week study tour
It begins and ends in Beijing.
Our host is a university in Beijing
and we get lectures
from
scholars at that university
and we also visit various sites in Beijing. ... So we had one lecture that was
at
the summer palace
and it was a lecture on the *** Wars, and the old summer palace was destroyed in the *** Wars
so it was very cool to have this lecture that was
you know, talking about the history that we were literally sitting on.
We then travel for about three weeks
through other parts of China
and every year we go to different places.
We also visit
villages
where students interview local residents about some aspects of their lives.
This in particular is unusual
because most foreign visitors to China
uh... rarely get a chance to go into the home of a Chinese farmer
to see how they live and talk to them. You do a field study in whatever
subject sort of interests you so a lot of students did health care when i went abroad
I did religious studies just because that's what I was interested in
but you can essentially choose whatever you want. The global health component is
related to the fact that the theme of the class is Chinese environmental
history
and we also
do spend some time
uh... talking a little bit about Chinese medicine
students declare what interests they have
and then we try to
find an internship that
closely suits their needs and interests.
I had a couple friends who were interested in environmental studies, so
they went to a panda preserve and worked with habitat restoration.
If you don't speak Chinese it's not a problem
Dreux, who's the director of the program, is fluent in Chinese and helps you
get around. And there are also usually a few students that are on the program who speak a bit
of Chinese.
But we also have translators and different tour guides.
I have not, in the five years - four years - that I've done it
I have not yet met a student
who
says like "Oh god, this is terrible, I have to go home" or "I can't take this change."
I've had a few people ask me when I came back if the cultural differences
of China affected my experience at all
And I definitely think that it didn't in a negative way, but definitely in a positive way.
People are really excited to be
trying new foods
seeing new ways of living
experiencing this entirely
alien kind of culture.
So if there's a medical emergency we have lists of hospitals that we can go to.
All students have insurance.
If there's a passport problem
we have traveling with us a Chinese
representative from a travel agency
who knows how to handle these problems.
I ate many crazy things on my experience. Um...
One of which was rat meat.
I also bamboo bugs
so it's like these huge beetles and all they eat is bamboo
and then they were fried in sort of a spicy sauce, and it was actually pretty good.
I hope that when students are done with the trip they become
less ethnocentric.
I had all these assumptions of what
America portrays China as
so I think that going on this program really opened my eyes and helped me experience
a different culture
in a new way.