A Video Look Back, a Year Later

Well, it's been more than a year since our first 4-Point trip to China. Finally we have the video (well really a slide show) documenting our trip up on the blog. Check it out, and thanks to Lorenzo Baker for putting it together.

Safe Returns and Lasting Memories

Well we've been back in the States for a few days and all are starting to get over the jetlag. What a trip it was. With 40 students and 6 faculty there are many lasting memories. Once again we would like to thank our host schools, Shenzhen Senior High School, the Chengdu Experimental Foreign Languages School, and Beijing Huijia Private School. At Huijia we spent the last morning visiting 7th grade classes, where our students spoke about our school and helped students with their spoken English. In return, the 7th graders taught our kids how to write their names using Chinese calligraphy. It was a fitting end to an incredible experience. All that is left is for the kids to produce their digital stories as lasting mementos of our trip.

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

The Chengdu Chronicles

A quick 3 hour flight from Beijing to Chengdu on Air China. We were greeted at the airport by Mr. Lee and Angela, representatives of the Chengdu Experimental Foreign Language School, and 12 students and their parents. They were holding bouquets of flowers and panda toys for our students. Our students were introduced to their host families and off they went in different directions for the night.

Day One

The next morning the students were brought to school by their host families at 7:15. The Chengdu Foreign Language School is a five day boarding school—the students live in dormitories from Monday to Friday and go home after class on Friday at 7:30 P.M. Our host students who live within 20 minutes of school stayed with their parents all week allowing our students to have true home stays. On our first morning the students attended classes with their hosts while Lorenzo and I taught two classes.

Chinese students at this school study English for 2 hours a day and they were excited to share their conversational skills with us.

Each classroom consists of 62 students and they sit at their desks from 7:00 AM to 7:30 PM with a break for lunch, a one hour nap in their dorms, and sports. The teachers move through each classroom every 40 minutes for different subjects.

After two classes the entire school—4000 students plus 500 teachers and administrators—met in the huge central courtyard for an all-school meeting. The students stand at attention in rows during the meeting. Mr. Wen, the Head of the School, gave a brief welcome speech to us under a huge red banner stretched across the front of the main school building which bore the names of both schools. Our students were given school uniforms, gifts were exchanged, and Mr. Baker gave a brief speech which was translated by CDEFLS students.

After the speech we boarded a bus and went for lunch. Our accompanying teachers Yang Zhaohui (Clark) and Yang Quin (Judy) made our selections for us. We were each served a huge bowl of steaming broth and plates and plates of different foods to place in the broth—Noodles, pieces of beef, garlic cloves, greens, chilies, mushrooms, whatever you wanted. Our students are very skilled with chopsticks!

After lunch we went to the Panda Research Center. It was located in a beautiful park and the pandas roam about their naturalistic enclosures. We were there at feeding time. Workers bring huge arm loads of bamboo to the pandas. They each eat 80 lbs. of bamboo a day, but they receive very little nutrition from their sole food source and must conserve energy and so do not move around much. When we returned to school the host families were again waiting for us and it was off to restaurants in Chengdu.

Day Two

This morning we boarded the bus for a trip Lishan, home of the Great Buddha carved out of a sandstone cliff, the Buddha was begun in 730 AD by a monk who was troubled by the number of boatmen who disappeared in the treacherous currents at the confluence of two rivers. The Buddha took 90 years to carve from the mountain. We hiked to the top of the Buddha and then descended a very steep set of stairs carved into the cliff with 25 switchbacks. At the base we could look out at the rivers and look up at Buddha whose huge image along with some later dredging has made the waters safer and more navigable. During the 4 hour round trip we were able to see some of the countryside outside Chengdu. Every tiny plot of land is planted with vegetables. Oranges were ripening on trees. The land is terraced for growing and at this time of year winter crops of broccoli, cabbage, radishes, bok choy and mustard greens are being harvested and warm weather crops are being planted. Great expanses of fields are yellow with mustard flowers. Everywhere we go there are street sweepers. They sweep the edges of the road with the brooms made of bamboo handles and branch heads. Sometimes the heads are fuzzy cloth but mostly they are long graceful branches tied into the handle. We passed a tea plantation where thousand upon thousands of tea bushes were growing upon terraced hills.

Day Three

Today we boarded the bus and ascended from the bowl that holds Chengdu up the rim of the bowl to the mountains. During our 1.5 hour drive through the mountains, many snow covered, revealed themselves through the haze. As we grew closer the air was clearer. The landscape here looks like a traditional Chinese painting. Mountains loom in the distance some of the trees are deciduous and others still hold their leaves in this moderate climate. Our students are becoming fine travelers. They watch and listen and are open to new foods and new ideas. We hiked up a mountain to a Taoist temple and on our return we had lunch at a farm. The farm grew trees and our meal was served out of doors and the food included many mountain specialties and wild-gathered foods. We noticed at the tree farm two topiaries each made of six mature trees which had been trained into the shape of a very large pagoda. After lunch we went to a massive irrigation system that was built 2,300 years ago. It provides the water for the city of Chengdu and its ingenious system which includes a mountain that was cut in half and an island that was built by hand and an ingenious system of diversion.

The students will spend the weekend with their host families and will no doubt experience hot pot, a lip-numbing caldron of boiling oil filled with hot peppers which is heated at your table by a gas burner built into the table into which you cook various foods. When Lorenzo and I had hot pot with our accompanying teachers, we cooked seaweed, noodles, mushrooms, duck tongues, duck feet, pork sausages, live catfish, lotus slices, potatoes and parts of the inside of a chicken which we could not identify and perhaps the strangest of all Vienna sausages—who knew?!

- Jan Baker

Noodles Anyone?

Today (Friday, February 29, 2008) we spent the day exploring “Splendid China” and “China Folk Cultural Villages,” two places the people in Shenzhen hold dear. We had the chance to see replicas of many historic Chinese sites as well as quintessential examples of the many different cultures that have influenced the Chinese way of life.

Lunch was wonderful, of course, and most enjoyed noodles or rice. It was a real treat to watch the chef making noodles as we anticipated our meal. Everyone is enjoying the warm weather. The kids are off for a weekend with their host families. We’ll post again after our Monday adventure.

- Jim McLaughlin & Denise Manning

Havin’ a Ball

Here we are enjoying our second full day in Shenzhen. We had a tour of the school’s science facilities before traveling to East Shenzhen to visit the beach and a very interesting theme park of sorts. We spent about 45 minutes or so on the beach where some of us had the chance to go bare foot in the waves. We thought the water was nice. The Chinese people thought the water was cold. After a futile attempt at describing the water temperature of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maine, we drove a few blocks to the theme park. A cable car took us to the top of a mountain where we had lunch on a deck overlooking the town and the beach where we had just been. We then took a bus down the backside of the mountain to a section of the park called Tea Stream Valley and let the students explore for a while before we headed back to Shenzhen.


I’m going to back track to yesterday, Wednesday, when we had a tour of the performing arts
facilities in the late afternoon after the students were in class. The chorus and the dance troupe in their perspective rehearsal spaces treated us to performances. (I was honored to be asked to play in return and happy to oblige.) We then got to hear the school’s orchestra in a rehearsal. All three groups were very impressive.




Please enjoy the photos included in this blog. Two of the photos will introduce our fearless guides. These three amazing young ladies have been accompanying us on our trips and taking very good care of us all.

Pictured with Denise are Lilly
and Lisa. Pictured with me are Lilly and Grace. Everyone is healthy and happy. Blog again soon.

- Jim McLaughlin

Hello from Chengdu!!

"All is well in Chengdu. We were met at the airport by students from the school who had flowers and panda bear toys for us. Yesterday we went to visit the pandas, and right now we are on the way to visit the giant Buddha! Excited to hear that the Juniors got so much snow for their Four Point!"

- Lorenzo Baker

Gould continues to receive telephone updates from the crew in Chengdu, which is currently without internet access, and will post them as they come in.