Tracy’s Adventures in China - July 2007
Many people have been asking to hear how my trip to China went. I decided that for ease of telling and ease of hearing that I would type up my adventure into a document that could be read whenever you have time. So here is my adventure.
This July I traveled to Nanjing, China for three weeks. I was there from the first of July until the twentieth, plus a day or so, on either end for traveling.
To start, some background information.
Nanjing is along the Yangtze River, and is the next big city inland along the Yangtze from Shanghai (about 150mi between them). It is 15hrs ahead of Seattle. July is part of monsoon season there, so the weather is usually a bit above 90 degrees F, and extremely humid. The sky is usually partially covered in clouds, but in a sunny way, not a dark gray way.
I went to Nanjing as part of a program run by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth (CTY). This was the first year that a CTY program was run at Nanjing. The program was located at the Hopkins Nanjing Center, a jointly run graduate school program run by Johns Hopkins and Nanjing University. During the program everyone stayed in the dorms, and we did not stay with any Chinese families.
There were about 150 kids in this program, mostly from the US, but also a few from Hong Kong and Singapore. All the students in the program had just finished 9th, 10th, 11th, or 12th grade. During the three weeks each student took one class out of the six that were offered, and everyone had one hour per day of Mandarin lessons based on previous Mandarin experience. The six classes were Comparative Eastern and Western Medicine, China-US Relations, Modernization in China, Chinese Philosophy, Chinese Dynasties, and Advanced Game Theory. Most of the classes have enough students that they were divided into two sections. The classes were split into sections by age, with the older students in one section, and the younger students in the other section. Each section (or classroom) of students was about 15 students, with one teacher and one TA per class.
My trip started when mom and I left Seattle for Los Angeles. We spent about a day and a half before leaving to take me to LAX late Friday evening. My flight was scheduled to leave at about 2am Saturday morning, but as it was an international flight we left plenty of time. I got checked in with the CTY people who were waiting there to meet about 40 of us that were flying together as a group to Hong Kong, where we would meet up with another group from JFK. 
In the ticket counter line I met my first other CTY student. That was Victor, from San Diego (He's the one in the picture over on the right. The ticket counter line, baggage drop-off line and the security line were all quick and smooth. Well, the security line wasn’t that fast just because it was a bit long, but it moved pretty quickly. I left mom as I got into the security line. When I got through security I met another CTY staff member, and I was grouped with three other students with the orders that we had to stay together until we reached our final destination. That only sort of happened – we kept an eye on each other but none of us really talked that much to any of the other three, and in Hong Kong we had made our own group of friends by that point. Flying to Hong Kong we were on a Cathay Pacific Airlines flight.
When we all got on the plane I found my seat, which was on an aisle near the right wing. To my delight the plane was a 747, and we boarded and took off on time. A few minutes after I sat down a rather frazzled looking girl who was also from CTY came and sat down next to me. We introduced ourselves, and I learned that this girl was Megan, and she had just barely caught her flight from Dallas to LAX. It took a few hours of talking between the two of us before she finally calmed down from not being sure whether she would make the flight to Hong Kong. What had happened was that in Dallas they were having a huge thunderstorm, so all the planes leaving Dallas were being delayed or canceled, so Megan had gone through a series of her flight being canceled, delayed, put on standby, etc. We talked for most of the 14hr flight, and neither of us got all that much sleep on that flight. When we got to Hong Kong it was Sunday morning. Due to the time zones and crossing the International Date Line we pretty much just skipped Saturday.
At the Hong Kong airport we went through security again, and then found the group from JFK that had arrived a little while before us. In Hong Kong it started to pour rain shortly after we arrived. This was my first experience with monsoon rain – it suddenly starts pouring so hard that you would think that someone had just dumped a full pail of never-ending pail of water over your head. It was quite interesting to watch through a window, along with all the other large jets, but as I later learned not all that fun to be in for very long. We sat for a few hours before boarding a smaller plane run by Dragonair for Nanjing.
However once we boarded the plane the flight crew explained that due to traffic in the Shanghai airspace we would be delayed 1 ½ - 2 hours. We were delayed for about 90min, along with another plane flying to Nanjing (different airline company) that had boarded through a nearby gate. Flying between Hong Kong and Nanjing takes about 2 hrs, so the plane was similar to a plane that would be used for a flight between Seattle and somewhere in California. CTY pretty much filled the entire economy class of the plane. It turns out that Megan and I had seats next to each other on this flight as well, but by this point we were both tired enough that we slept for most of the flight. The third person in our row was Caty, who turned out to be one of the girls across the hall from me in the dorms during camp. Flying out over the greater Hong Kong area I saw that it is really a bunch of islands, and somewhere there is a mainland, but it was hard to tell what was what, and which set of buildings really is Hong Kong.
When we arrived in Nanjing we got our luggage, and went through the various stages of customs. Along with the basic questions about weapons or expensive goods the various customs/entry forms also ask you if you have been near a poultry farm recently, or if you have any media material that is morally corrupting. It’s illegal to bring material into China that can morally corrupt someone according to the customs form. After we had passed through the last checkpoint for entry we got out luggage. Megan’s luggage hadn’t made the connection from Dallas to LAX/Hong Kong, so she didn’t get her luggage until the next day. Finally we headed outside, where it was damp and cloudy, but not raining. There we piled onto three buses to take us to the Hopkins Nanjing Center (HNC). We were packed on them so tightly that there wasn’t enough for all of the luggage in the storage bays, so we filled the aisle full of suitcases.
The ride to HNC lasted about 45 minutes. It was really cool to finally get to see what everyday China looks like. It’s really green in Nanjing; lots of trees and fields near the city, and they have tiny planter boxes along the edges of the freeway overpasses. It’s also so hot that it almost seems tropical, even though it is technically not in the tropics in Nanjing.
When we got to HNC it was early evening, so we had dinner and spent the rest of the evening unpacking, getting checked in with the administrators, and getting to know our roommates and the other people on our hall. When we were unpacking I realized that I had the right roommate out of all the girls on my hall, because we were getting along great, and we were the only two on our hall that kept falling asleep as we were trying to unpack. Jetlag had finally caught up with us. Unfortunately, we didn’t get finished with registration until lights out at 10:30, so we didn’t get to go to bed very early. My roommate’s name was Emily. She was from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. We ended up getting along great the whole three weeks.
At CTY Nanjing this year dorms were arranged first by gender, and then by age, so all the girls in my RA group were going into 10th grade. Each RA group had about 16 students in it. There were two RA groups per floor, and the dormitory building was five stories. There were nine RA groups total, so the 5th floor had only one group on it. The 1st, 2nd, and 5th floors were the guys’ halls, and the 3rd and 4th floors were the girls’ halls. I was on the 3rd floor. My RA was named Kerry. She's from California.
The pictures on this sight came from a variety of places. Some were taken by me, but others were taken by other people at camp. Those people are Schuyler, Carrie, Caty, Kerry, Kaitlyn, Meredith, and Marissa.