This article is part of a new initiative by The Stork, sharing student exchange stories to inspire and guide future exchange students with insights, recommendations, and memorable experiences.By Avery Hazard
Do you like to travel? Do you like to learn languages and new cultures? This program will allow you to study Chinese at Keats School in Kunming.
Kunming, 昆明, is a small Chinese city of six million people and is the provincial capital city of Yunnan province. It is also well-known as the ‘Eternal Spring City,’ which has the mildest climate in the southwestern land of China. Keats School, where I attended, offers one-on-one intensive classes and small group classes of six people. I chose to do the group class, where we did four hours of class together until lunch, where we ate with our laoshi (teacher) to practice more spoken Chinese. However, there was also an option to also do a two-hour intensive one-on-one after lunch, but I chose to use my free afternoons to explore the city instead.
I am a North American IE student who completed the Chinese beginner course at IE before traveling to Kunming for the summer. I have dreamed of coming to China since meeting my best friend, who is from China, in high school, and it felt surreal from the moment I stepped on its soil.
School Activities
One of my favorite parts of Keats was that they offered outdoor cultural classes on Fridays where your teacher would challenge your speaking abilities in Chinese. Here, with my laoshi and classmates, we did a Chinese tea ceremony and jewelry-making lessons and visited the local railway museum.
We also explored a local Shaolin temple where we saw monks doing martial arts by walking on the walls. In such a lesson, in the Yunnan Railway Museum, my teacher gave a sheet of questions to which we had to ask Chinese people to find the answers. As only elementary learners, we asked more questions about getting to know people.
Keats also offered Friday night and Saturday activities, and as the summer progressed and the school became busier, Sunday activities were also launched. Friday night activities often involved going to night markets.
One night, I was there, and the Friday night activity was going to the Kunming Special Beer Festival. Though the festival could never rival any OctoberFest, it was really fun to try local beer in the Yunnan province with one such brand called Dali. The festival was more like a growth of beer, skateboarding, and the tattoo artist community environment.
On Saturday and Sunday, we tend to do more day activities with the school, and the school pays for everyone’s transportation. We did hiking, aquarium visits, and temple visits. One of my favorite temples I saw with the school was the Tanhua temple. It had a beautiful park surrounding it with tons of tables where Aiyis and Shushus could play Mahjong together or dance.
Individual Exploration
I became the local “Dora the Explorer” or “Wandering Waiguoren” (foreigner) at my school because I mostly walked everywhere since I could. The Kunming old and downtown was a 20-minute walk away from campus, so I often went out with various friends to explore. Though the school did not usually have a significant exchange with many local Kunming people, it was not hard to make friends with the locals as you often tend to be the only foreigners in the city. In my experience, everyone I made friends with generally did not want me to pay for anything as they insisted I was the guest.
One of my favorite memories this summer was when two friends and I decided to try an esports cafe. We aren’t necessarily gamers, but esports cafes and internet cafes are trendy in China, and we want to try one. We went to one 网鱼网咖 or Fish Internet Cafe. I started to ask the cafe registrars how to pay, as I spoke the best among the three. Suddenly, my friend, who knew the least Chinese, held up Google Translate, stating with an equivalent translation, “We want to play video games.” At that moment, we lost it in laughter at his blunt nature, and our poor friend had to keep translating with the app in communication with the registers. To our discovery and sadness, foreigners can not play video games at Chinese internet cafes due to a lack of Chinese State ID.
All in all, I came to China because I had a dream. I dreamed of exploring my best friend’s home country, learning a language I often hear, and stepping into another culture to discover and learn more about myself and the world around me. I could have waited for an exchange semester with IE next year, but it’s different. IE’s study abroad in China is conducted in major cities, such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen, while Kunming was where I could get complete immersion and experiences that I may not necessarily get in those cities. To truly study Chinese, explore, and experience without worrying about other distractions was a privilege I could only have by pushing myself to travel over the summer.
I chose now. What do you choose?
Featured image courtesy of Chris Travel Blog
