Day 5: 6/29/2019

We started today with breakfast in the dining hall which was not too bad. I’m still getting used to eating things like chicken and dumplings for breakfast. Afterwards, we had our opening ceremony for the program. The Vice President of the Xiamen University’s Arts and Humanities college along with a few professors gave speeches to welcome us and we all introduced ourselves one by one. We also met students from the university who would be our tutors and teachers for interest groups in the coming weeks. After lunch, we had our first language class. We found out today that our intermediate level class’s teacher won’t actually be here until July 3rd so in the meantime we have a different teacher. Today we just made self-introductions and talked about our hobbies, birthdays, etc. After class, we had our first interest group. We got the choice between handcrafting and calligraphy. Since calligraphy was so popular, they decided to offer it again later in the program so my friends and I chose the handcrafting one this time. Our activity was to make our own Peking opera masks. We didn’t finish them but we did outline them and start painting a little! We have three more classes so we’ll get to finish them later. Next, we had our first tutoring session with the s students from the university. We talked with them about our self introductions from earlier and also talked more about where we are from, the weather, what we like to eat, etc. I learned a lot of new vocabulary already so I can’t wait to see how much I learn in the coming weeks!!

I've been trying to get the pictures to upload, but the WiFi isn't the best so no luck yet :(.

再见！