The Chicago Urban League is proud to announce that it is once again hosting a student mission trip to China! For the next two weeks, 24 CUL students are being immersed in the Chinese culture, customs and cuisine. This is a journey is an adventure of a lifetime that is sure to change their lives.
The great news is that we get to be a part of their journey through the blogs they are writing. Check out the fourth entry below:
Today is Thursday June 23rd and your bloggers for today are Amiya Crockrom and Paula Pettis. Today we woke up at 5:30am which is pretty good because, ever since we got here, we’ve been waking up at 4:00am. Breakfast was at 8:30am, and it was pretty good! We really love the student ambassadors from Hangzhou Wanxiang Polytechnic because they are so nice and friendly. We are getting to know a few of the students and their stories are amazing. They are just like us, which lets us be able to relate and bond with them. They showed us the Chicago Urban League’s Student Mission to China Tree of Friendship that was planted in 2014. We saw their classrooms, and they are smaller than normal college campus classrooms. We visited the college campus library; it’s beautiful and very well air-conditioned. In the library, there are displays of students’ fashion work and they are AMAZING!! I (Amiya) saw some silver shoes that I just have to have. The students have created beautiful pieces of clothing, they are very unique and you can tell that they take pride in their work.
After visiting the library, we saw a Tea Art performance. They showed us the proper way to make tea. Two of our ambassadors, Australia Harrison and Asiah Siler, got a chance to actually learn and perform the proper way of fixing and pouring tea and it was really cool.
Being here is so beautiful; getting a taste of their culture is just a blessing. Our seminar on the teachings of Confucius, Laozi and Sunzi was really inspiring. It opened our eyes, and we want to start learning about Confucius more, something that we took out of the lesson was to learn more, make friends and to just be cool. I think this is something that we really have to learn and focus on as teenagers. To end the day on a good note, we learned how to do Chinese Calligraphy and Chinese Culinary Art where we made dumplings. We believe all of the ambassadors had a lot of fun with these two workshops, and now we are ready for Day 5!
We would just like to thank, the Chicago Urban League, Ms. Parker, the China-United States Exchange Foundation, Hangzhou Wanxiang Polytechnic and everyone else who made this possible. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and we are just blessed to have it!
~Amiya Crockrom and Paula Pettis
