Virtual China '98

What a week! This has always been the highlight of the school year for me, and this year is no different! After a rocky start to the week (torrential rain for the entire first day of biking!) things have "dried out" a bit and we've had some incredible experiences over the last five days.

The highlight of the week for me was going back to a village where I had spent quite a bit of time on the trip last year. I had taken pictures of several of the little kids in the village last year and wanted to give some of these pictures to the people this year. We had a bit of a difficult time finding the village again, but what a welcome we got when we did find it! The first people we ran into upon entering the village were the old lady and her little grandson who I had taken pictures of last year. I gave a framed picture of the little boy to him and he was absolutely mesmerized by this. It was possibly the first time he had ever seen a picture of himself! I don't think he put down the pictures the entire time we were in the village.

The next stop was a small house just up the road to visit a little girl. I wish I could have had a video camera to capture the looks on the girl's and her mother's faces when they recognized the people in the picture. That moment was one I will remember for the rest of my life! Of course, we had to take more pictures this year of the girl, her mother, and myself. (I maybe didn't have a video camera, but I certainly captured the moments in pictures!)

The highlight of the China Bike Trip '98 in my group was the school visits in a Middle School in Xinxing. The school had about one thousand and two hundred students. They were ages from thirteen to sixteen. By the time we arrived the school, the school kids had just started their afternoon class from lunch.

We saw the school kids were all standing outside their classroom in different floors of the school. They stared at a group of "strangers" from Hong Kong International School with friendly and smiling faces.

When we entered the school, almost all the kids clapping their hands to welcome us. We felt so embarrassed but I was touching by their warm hospitality. From the teachers, we were the first group from overseas visited their school.

First we stopped at the teacher's office. Ms Kong , an English teacher of the school, answered all the questions for our school profile worksheet. After we completed the worksheet, Ann O'Connor and Trisha Apte asked if they could teach the school kids' English in their class. Ms Kong kindly accepted our request.

We went to a classroom with forty students. Again, they clapped hands to welcome us with cheerful smiles. I introduced to them where we were from and the purpose of our visit. Then I asked Ann, Trisha, Ben and Joshua to introduce themselves in Chinese. The students were so surprised that they knew Chinese. Since the local school kids' English level was not very high, we decided to teach them two songs. One was ABC and the other was Happy Birthday. They had little problem following us to sing the songs at the beginning. But they made it after they tried hard.

It was great to have our students get in touch with the local students. This kind of culture exchange was a great experience for them and also for myself. I was glad I can speak the languages and I was in the bike trip this year.

It's my first time to escort a group of 5 students to do a biking trip in Southern China for 6 days. We started our bike trip on the first day, 26 April. I was shock to see the bikes we are going to use. It really scared me when I saw something (it's the crank with pedal) suddenly fell off Beth's bike. Lucky she was going uphill and I couldn't imagine what would happen if she's doing downhill. This incident happened three times during our bike trip. I was impressed that this student could be so tolerable.

During this trip, we did some village visits, factory visits (such as lime stone factory, air compressor factory, rice wine factory), farms visits and school visits. After all the village visits, we learned that the village people normally lived together with brothers, parents and uncles in the same villages, whereas sisters and relatives will go back to the village for gathering only in major Chinese festivals, marriage or funeral ceremony. We came across a funeral ceremony in one of these village visits and we saw they included some organs (including liver, bladder, heart and throat) of the pig to worship the deceased person. We observed a pig farm - one of the businesses that the village possessed. That's why they put pig's organs there.

When we were riding on the road, we were greeted by the people with smiling faces, especially the little kids. Mike said that he often hesitated and wondered whether those people were saying "Hello" or yelling "Gwailo".

After an evaluation with the students, they gave me a feedback that this bike trip is valuable to them and they have a better impression of China as it's not so bad as in their mind. It's quite scary to them when we passed one of the rubber factories. They felt sorry that the people in China had not done anything to deal with the pollution matter yet.

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