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This week was my last week with my host family and it was filled with various trips around Kunming. Below is a view from my host family’s apartment, it was an especially sunny day in the city.

One afternoon I went with some friends to a park in the city, it also has roller coaster so we decided to be adventurous and went on the one that goes upside down four times. 

My apartment seems to be in a pretty great location with lots of cafes and gyms near it. My friends and I found a newly opened rock climbing gym, i forgot how hard it is to scale a wall!

This week we had an assignment to write a life history paper. It involved going up to strangers and asking them questions about their life. Of course this was all done in Chinese! I went to a place called Green Lake Park where most retired people like to hang out in the mornings. I found this experience to be extremely rewarding and provide firsthand accounts that I otherwise would have no idea of their existence. These concrete examples allowed me to get a better understanding of Chinese history, Chinese society and Chinese people’s life. The exercise also helped me to build up field study skills such as designing questions, conducting interviews, and analyzing the data I collected. I did find the life history interviews to be frustrating at times. I could understand the very basics of the conversation but there were most likely many smaller details that I missed for lack of vocabulary and fluency. There were also more complicated questions that I would have loved to ask on the spot. Despite these frustrations I did find this exercise demonstrated to me that just in 6 weeks, my language skills have improved significantly!

My host family took me out to dinner to celebrate my last weekend with them. Time seems to be flying by so quickly, but we are already planning a trip for my host sister to visit me in the summer!

Just a photo of my host mom and I bonding over face masks!

I hope everyone has a great week!

Elizabeth

Last weekend I had the opportunity to go to a beach town called Byron Bay and it’s known for having the best beaches in Australia.  I traveled with three other friends and we were able to hangout and have a relaxing weekend, but at the same time explore another area of Australia.  We arrived on Friday and got to explore the town, which is very granola, and spent most of our day at the beach.  We considered this to be a recovery day because the previous week was extremely hectic with classes and coming back from our spring break trip to Thailand(see last week’s post).  So we finished off the day by going on a hike to the towns lighthouse and watching the sunset.

The next day we went on sea kayaking tour where we could go looking for whales and dolphins.  I’ll admit that at first I was very skeptical in the tour because there were no signs of life for a while but all of a sudden it was like they were putting on a show for us.  We saw so many whales and they got very close to our kayaks and it was amazing.  I wasn’t able to get any photos of the whales but I was able to get an action shot of my friend Maddy who was my kayaking partner!

On our final day, we took a bus ride to a near by town called Nimbin.  We traveled on a bus called the Happy Coach and the town itself felt like we time traveled back into the 70s.  It was fun to explore the shops and the other local attractions in the town.

Overall though we did a lot of eating on this trip.  Since the three girls that I traveled with are all gluten free and dairy free, we went to some cafes and restaurants that I can say I might not have picked out on my own but I’m extremely glad that we did.  We shared all of our meals with each other so that we could try as much as we could off the menus because they all looked sooooo good.  We definitely had a foodie experience this past weekend.

As of today, I have two weeks of class left before entering finals period which is honestly crazy.  I still feel like I just got off the plane to Australia.  I still have some more trips planned and this weekend I will be heading to Melbourne with the same girls I traveled with to Byron Bay last weekend.  I’ll keep you all posted!

Miss you all!

Allison

Buona sera!

Hope everyone is enjoying fall at Bucknell! The weather this week in Florence has not been ideal (I’m not really a big fan of it…its currently thunder storming. Ugh.). It got really cold all of a sudden and there is no heat in my home stay. I’ve been bundling up when I sleep and I even broke out the fuzzy socks.

I stayed in Florence this past weekend and got caught up on some homework. For my art history homework, I had to go to San Miniato al Monte, a basilica in Florence, and draw different parts and then describe it in ‘art history’ terms. It’s pretty cool to actually see things in person, and not just in a textbook.

Tomorrow morning I am leaving to go to Padua and Mantua for the weekend with my art history class. I think we will be seeing some of the art that we have talked about in class that will also be on our midterm exam next week.

My Italian professor told us we had to go to the Mercato Centrale to take pictures of the food and learn about it. Here is a picture of a pizza I ate at there. It was delicious!

Ciao Ciao!