Readings/ A special trip to a new World, China

We praise this splendid account for its candor and simplicity, for how vivacious and direct it is. How a young girl coming of age with her classmates demonstrates a great ability, sincere and open, to view a world so different and complicated.

By Francesca Catherine Bruni

I was pretty calm and I had no worries about leaving until the night before when I got the chills!! I started to worry. When we got to the airport the tension was high, and we were all really excited! After a long trip we were cooked! We got there exhausted! My first impression was not very positive. The airport was boiling hot. The air was muggy and dense. We took a bus to the hotel, but honestly it was the worst ride ever! There was no sky practically. The air was full with so much smog it made it really hard to breathe for the first week, then you get used to it. Although I must say that whenever the sun did decide to come out it was gorgeous! The University where we studied had a really big campus. We got lost at least twice. One interesting thing I won’t forget was the laundromat, it was so dirty. The owners seemed careless. Nobody came to the front desk for at least twenty minutes. When we went back to pick up our clothes they had lost it and it took them half an hour to find it! The most horrible part was the smell. Ohhhhh the smell!!! It was awful! Anywhere we went  the sewage system was dreadful! Stinky boiling fumes and vapors seeped out from the  manhole. Ewwwhhhh!!!

Let’s not bring that back to mind. Let me tell you the best, the most memorable parts of my trip.
We had to get up at 7:00 but we were used to that. Everything we did was on a tight schedule so anything we had to watch the time, but it was worth it, even though it was exhausting. School started at 9:00 and we had 50 minute lessons. After every lesson we could take a 10 min break. We usually went downstairs to the supermarket to get snacks. Thank The Lord that there they had American junk food! When the bell rang we all knew we needed to be back in class. That bell was our inspiration! It was a short song for preschoolers! It was so funny, we laughed every time we heard it. The lessons were completely in Chinese. As last resource we tried to ask in English. Every once in a while we watched movies in Chinese with English subtitles. That was really interesting, and kind of hard to follow.
We always ate breakfast in the hotel. It was really hard watching the Chinese people eat spaghetti and chicken and all the unimaginable foods for breakfast. We just stuck to bread and jam with a glass of mango juice. That was our typical breakfast. It kept us going for the day. I’m not saying that we didn’t eat anything else during the day, actually quite the opposite. Breakfast just prepared us for what was to come. We usually ate lunch at the university. The food, at least I think, was really good. They had to make it closer to what we liked and what we are used to, but in order to do so every meal had a lot of fried food! Infact I am so tired of eating fried food that it’s not even funny. I am in New York,  a place where you can get food of any kind all the time, but I promise you that I don’t want to even look at something fried or I will puke!
We usually went out to different restaurants for dinner. The dumplings were so good!!! We even learned how to make them. One day we made them ourselves in the university’s kitchen. It was so much fun. They tasted so dry but still, we were so proud.

They never gave us anything spicy which was a bummer because most Chinese people eat spicy food. We tried it only once. Thank God only once!!! I personally love spicy foods and I am really tolerant. I can even eat a pepper directly from the garden, but that is nothing compared to their spicy spices! Ohhhh my gosh!!!!! We started crying and turning red. We didn’t know that it was spicy so we took big bites…NEVER AGAIN!!!
Apart from that it was ok. It was really hard learning how to use the chopsticks for most people. A few of us on the way there, on the flight asked the flight attendant to teach us how to use the chopsticks, and thank goodness we did because there was no place in all of china, where we went, that had forks. It was crazy!
We got to see Chinese acrobats in action !! They were so cool! They were so agile and quick on their feet. They were so calm and graceful. I would definitely watch them again anytime.
We also got to watch a karate show. That was outstanding! It was unbelievable. We got to see these shows at nighttime. We went back to the hotel around 9:30 usually, there were exceptions when we came back either earlier or later, which was annoying. We almost always came back later, so for the first week I didn’t get to speak with my mom. That was upsetting. When I did get to Skype her I only had time for that so we had no free time to go to our friends’ rooms.

On the weekends we got to go out on day excursions. We went to see the “Sky Temple” it was astonishing! The temple was so mystical and magical. Everything was in order and calm. There was peace and serenity. People were so respectful that they didn’t even whisper. An interesting aspect of any place was the people who did yoga in the parks or Chinese dances in the street – at any hour of the day.
The Great Wall was breathtaking!!! It was a pain to climb up to the top! We were dying of thirst. The steps were never ending. We were dripping with sweat. But when we reached the top we realized that it was definitely worth the climb! There are no words imaginable to describe the beauty of that “realm” . There is no place on earth like that one. It was simply perfect. (And even the photos were amazing, even though they don’t do it justice).

The most fun we had though was at the markets. The owners of the shops would ask absurdly high prices. We would laugh in their faces and negotiate the prices. The prices would drop so low because they were so desperate. If the price they wanted was too high we would tell them that other people asked less. If they still didn’t budge we would pretend to  leave and they would run after us and grab our arms and lower the price so low that things cost less than $3.00. It was a really fun experience. The stuff at the markets was cheap, imitation stuff but it was really fun to make them upset because we lowered the prices so much.
In the end the experience was amazing. We had so much fun. We were just getting used to the idea of being far from home. I would have loved to stay there longer if we didn’t have to go to class because in the end, being there with the class really made us grow as a group. We had so much fun together. There is so much stuff left to see. I can’t wait to go back next year even though I was ready to come back home. We all were. It really opened my mind and made me realize that I would never actually want to live there, but it sure did open horizons. We truly were immersed in the culture. Learning about a new culture, a new way of life really does open so many doors.
I really enjoyed the trip and I would definitely do it again. It was unforgettable.

Francesca Catherine Bruni

Post scriptum: I chose my high school, the “National College Vittorio Emanuele II”, in Rome, because it is innovative. It gave me the chance to look over my country (I’m Italian from my father and my mother’s side from the U.S.), look at the world from a different perspective, the eastern one, but not just any, the Chinese. The obstacles and difficulties faced during this school year were many, but I’m happy to say that I and my companions we overcame them all.