Stony Point

It's the end of day two here. We're staying here at the Stony Point Center until we leave on Tuesday. This place is interesting: think combination summer camp/hippie commune/freshman year of college. It's not what I expected, but it's peaceful, and they grow much of their own food here, so meals have been delicious!

Today was jam-packed! We started out with some introductions and then we dove right into China! Although it feels like the more I learn, the more I know I don't know, today has served to start breaking down what had been, in my mind, China as a monolithic culture. In our first sessions, we learned about the past 100 years of Chinese history. After lunch a professor from Vassar College came to speak to us about modern China. We ended the afternoon with a look at the Chinese education system and a crash course in Chinese.

So far, I can say, "Hello." ni hao

(Full disclosure, I already knew that before the crash course. Chinese is hard!)

Some big ideas I've taken away from all the sessions today:

1. Chinese students attend school in a hyper-competitive system. The one test they take at the end of high school has an impact on the rest of their and their family's life!
2. The rise of China in the past 25 or so years is unprecedented in the history of the world, and things are changing so rapidly there that people even 5 years apart in age have trouble relating to each other.
3. A common greeting among Chinese is, "Have you eaten?" I love this.

There's more...the proof are my pages of notes, but my brain is too mushy to write more here. Tomorrow we get more Chinese language, Chinese economics, some specifics about the cities we'll visit. (Which are, by the way: Beijing, Xi'an, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.)

A flowering tree at the Stony Point Center.