Though I wrote this post in Italy over a week ago, I’m only posting it now because I didn’t have internet access in Italy, and because here at Yale I’ve been pretty busy unpacking and running errands.

I meant to write another post before I left China, but I ended up being very busy with work. So instead, this post is from Italy, where I am on vacation with my family. In some ways, this is actually a nice way to finish the blog – I can reflect on my experience in Beijing from a place that really seems to be its opposite. The Tuscan countryside is slow-paced, calm, lush, and clear-skied, everything that Beijing is not. I was almost in shock the first few days we were here, since even the towns seemed eerily empty to me.
Another big adjustment for me since leaving Beijing has been the change in language. Speaking English on the last day of the program felt extremely bizarre, especially when we were spending time with the teachers. Even though they were supposed to only use English for our graduation lunch, we ended up speaking a lot of Chinese just because we were more comfortable with the teacher-student dynamic that way. To make things even more confusing, the next day I flew off to Pisa by way of Munich, where I was suddenly confronted with huge amounts of German. Though I could understand all the German I heard perfectly, I couldn’t speak it at all. When I tried to produce very simple German sentences, Chinese came out instead. I also had to think for a very long time about certain grammar structures, especially those for which Chinese was more similar to English than German was. Since I had so much trouble speaking German, I actually had to speak English with all the Germans in the airport, which was quite embarrassing. In one case, I asked a Chinese passenger for advice about something rather than a German airport official, just because I felt so much more comfortable speaking Chinese.
The last week of HBA sped by as quickly as I expected it would. I didn’t have extracurriculars, so I took advantage of the extra time by doing a bit of exploring and last-minute gift shopping. One of the highlights of the week was a quick trip to Peking University, which is quite beautiful. It’s very large, and a lot of it seems to be a pretty park, with no university buildings at all. Other than that, the strangest thing about the week was that it was business as usual for the most part. We did, however, get to ask our teachers questions about themselves for a change on our last Thursday afternoon.
I promised last time that I’d write a quick description of each of the fun and interesting things I did during my second semester. Our first weekend HBA activity after we got back from the social study project was an acrobatics show. Most of the things the acrobats did were absolutely jaw-dropping – balancing themselves on each other in very contorted positions, balancing on tiny wooden boards stacked on piles of precariously positioned chairs, riding a bicycle twenty at a time, and so on. I’d already seen a lot of these sorts of acrobatic performances at a Cirque du Soleil show a few years back, but that didn’t make the show any less amazing. The next weekend, we went to a famous tea house in Beijing. Though they served us pretty good green tea and some small snacks, the main attraction was a series of performances including traditional music, martial arts, more acrobatics, and, of course, ceremonial tea pouring. It was a lot of fun, and I particularly enjoyed hearing some of the traditional folk music.

So that’s it! (Well, besides the post entirely filled with pictures I’ll put up after this.) I can’t believe I’m about to start up Chinese classes again, but I think I’m more excited about it than I was a week ago (when I wrote this post). I’m so, so grateful to the Light Fellowship for giving me the amazing opportunity to learn Chinese in Beijing at such a fantastic program. And thanks to everyone for reading!