Computing Kids Teacher, Cameron , spent part of the 2019 summer traveling through China. We love to encourage our team to get out of their comfort zone and enjoy new experiences. We asked Cameron to share some of his favorite experiences from his time abroad.
This summer I travelled to China with my girlfriend Christie who was going there to see her family. This was actually the second time I had gone, as I participated in a study abroad program in Beijing last year. Christie’s family lives in the city of Wuhu in Anhui province, so the majority of time we spent there.
Wuhu is a city of 3 million people situated on the Yangtze River. This was quite a different experience from when I was in China last year, as I didn’t really venture outside the large cities like Beijing and Shanghai then. Wuhu is a major industrial center and port, with dozens of large container and freight ships coming in and out daily and sprawling districts of factories and energy production along the shore (although ironically, pollution there was nowhere near as bad as what I experienced in Beijing). It is a scale of industrialization that I have never seen in the United States.
After staying in Wuhu for a week, we travelled to Nanjing, capital of neighboring Jiangsu province and capital of the Chinese Republic during the 1930s. We were only there for two days, but managed to see the massive Nanjing History Museum and the Mausoleum of Sun Yat-Sen. From Nanjing we flew to Xiamen, a coastal city in the south. The climate there is nearly tropical and gave us an opportunity to swim in the ocean. Xiamen has a very different feel from Chinese cities in other regions, as it sits directly across from Taiwan, and a Taiwanese island is actually visible from shore. The Taiwanese influence is palpable, with a good number of signs written in traditional characters and distinct styles of buildings and alleys. The food in Xiamen is also reminiscent of American Chinese food, as a huge proportion of early Chinese immigrants to the U.S. came from that region.
After returning to Wuhu by bullet train (over 150 mph!), we went on a road trip around rural Anhui province. This was an extremely interesting experience not only because the natural scenery was incredible but also because the towns and villages we drove through were so vastly different from those in the American countryside. Agriculture in rural Anhui is very small scale and for the most part without mechanization of any kind. People still walk the fields harvesting by hand. A stark contrast to the vast commercial farms harvested via combine in the American west. Probably my favorite memory of the whole trip was staying in one of these villages overnight. We ate with the local people on an outdoor patio, and there were more stars in the sky than I have ever seen. It was such a restorative experience for someone who lives in a city.
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