A Final Word From Chengdu

Monday, March 3

This morning we all met again after the weekend. The students spent the weekend with their host families. Everyone shared stories on the bus about restaurants, museums, karaoke, foot massages and more.

We visited Szechwan University this morning and learned that it was started in 1911 by a group of educators from the US and Canada. We visited two museums on the campus that were opened especially for us. We looked at 2,500 year-old pottery, spun prayer wheels, and looked at 4” long shoes that belonged to women who had had their feet bound in infancy. The practice ended in 1910. Our guide explained that it was the fashion to bind women’s feet because it made them look delicate and their short poulting gait was particularly appealing. They also told us that it was believed at the time that a woman with large feet could never find a husband. For some reason everyone looked at my size 10 feet!

Then it was off to lunch at a restaurant famous for Chengdu snacks, where we inhaled plates of noodles as thick as a pencil with spicy sauce, rice porridge, dumplings served under a veil of whole-studded batter, a different kind of dumpling, bowls of tea and fried squares of something delicious that was scarfed up before we got the name of it.

After lunch we visited a temple that was begun in 1720 A.D. The walkways were lined with huge ceramic pots filled with 5’ tall twisted bonsai of flowering quince, cherry and crab just coming into bloom. Further inside the monastery there was an enclosed garden with hundreds of ancient bonsai.

Then it was back on the bus and back to school. Every two weeks for one hour the school has “English Corner” where students meet and speak to one another in English. We were the honored guests and we spread ourselves out in the courtyard and students (about 200 of them!) gathered around us and we had conversations! It was great! We were rock stars! Everyone was so enthusiastic and animated! It was a proud moment for me. I felt like I was looking at our kids in a new way—suddenly they were self-assured, confident travelers in a very different culture, and they were only too happy to be ambassadors for Gould, and quite possibly leaning into being citizens of the world.

After English Corner everyone put on the uniforms the school gave them and we went to a restaurant with teachers and host students for a wonderful farewell banquet. The food was delicious, the company was comfortable after a week together, and great fun was had.

Lorenzo and I are so proud of David, Samantha, Gigi, Jacob, Alice, PJ, Ellen (Buster), Jess, Meghan, Elise, Abram and Oran; they’ve tried “it” whatever “it” was—new food, new friends, endless, endless, endless stairs, new frontiers in plumbing, and everything in-between. It was all good, and we would travel with them again—anywhere!

- Jan Baker