Hannah Blog April 2

First Impressions of the Village

After nearly 30 hours of travel, we arrived at Sanbaishan. We were welcomed to the hotel where we would be staying the night by the very enthusiastic staff, who had many cameras and were even equipped with an overhead drone. We were seated at a “lazy susan” table which was elaborately decked out with lots and lots of Chinese food: both vegetable and meat soups, noodle dishes, and egg dishes. The inside disk of the table, where the food dishes were, slowly rotated around, so that if you wanted a dish on the other side of the table you needed to wait until it came around to you and then serve yourself quickly before it rotated away again. I think the most notable thing about this meal was that all of the dishes were communal, requiring a serving spoon or chopsticks to serve yourself a small portion onto a personal plate. Because of this arrangement, and the rotating table, the meal became a communal activity, which I thought was very fun.

The next morning, we went to a welcome ceremony at the mayor’s office. The mayor and several other government officials gave formal speeches welcoming us to the town, although I don’t know exactly what they said because they spoke very fast and there were no translation services. After the speech-giving, we went around in a circle and each student quickly introduced themselves, briefly mentioning our name, grade, and a hobby we enjoy at home. After these formalities were taken care of, we were introduced to our homestay families. There was a representative from each family also present at the meeting, and so each homestay group of students went to greet their homestay parent and walk home with them. In the case of Isobel and me, our host mother greeted us and showed us the way to the house.

Once Isobel and I arrived at our house, one thing that I immediately noticed was that it’s three stories tall. Our room is on the third floor, which means we need to climb a long flight of stairs whenever we need to get something from our room or change clothes. I found this very interesting because I was expecting the houses to be smaller. Inside the sitting room area on the first floor, there are lots of posters in Chinese offering motivation for why a student should study (we later learned that our family has several children currently in school.) Soon, our host mother and father came to sit with us at a small tea table, and they made us tea with some sort of flower (they gave us the Chinese name for this but I didn’t recognize it,) as well as flavorful sunflower seeds and a small smoothie-like drink which I think was made with taro. It’s striking to me how good the food is here; even the small snacks such as this smoothie are so delicious without being overly sugary or processed.

Because this was my and Isobel’s first conversation with our host parents, our Chinese was broken and fleeting, and we felt very overwhelmed by the language barrier. However, our host families were understanding of this and did their best to get their meaning across despite knowing no English at all. At the time of my writing this, we’ve now had four meals with them, and I’ve already noticed vast improvements in our language abilities. I’ve started remembering vocabulary that I learned a while ago but since forgot, which is comforting because I like being able to converse with the people here. I expect that my Chinese will only get better as the trip goes on!