Faith Williams: Our Final Day in China

Our jobs were quite easy today as most of the day was free time. A lot of the group chose to go to Summer Palace, and then make second trips back to the Pearl Market to do more shopping. At 5pm we met as a group at the Deluxe Hutong and participated in a teacher lead activity discussing the highpoints and low-points in each city, and any pre trip beliefs that were proven to correct or just a myth. We broke into random groups to do this, and then came together as one big group and each group shared their findings. This was a good activity because it really encouraged all the students to think back and allowed everybody to voice their opinions and discoveries of what China was really like in comparison to what was thought before we departed. Personally one of my biggest realizations was that the air pollution wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I had imagined. We could see blue sky on several days we were there and even saw stars some nights! My breathing wasn’t effected whatsoever and after being there I somewhat question why a lot of Chinese people wear masks over their mouth. Perhaps we just happened to have a really good couple weeks there and got lucky.

Next Steph and I lead a group activity. We came up with an activity that would really emphasis how well the group got to know each other, and how we had become like a family, and had talked to every single person multiple times during the trip. We had a series of about 18 questions about each person in the group,  that you could only answer if you had talked to them during the trip and actually listened. We put everybody into groups of 3 and asked them all the questions only giving them about 20 seconds to answer each question.  My impression was that everybody had a lot of fun doing this activity, they were engaged, competitive and participating.

Once the quiz was done me and Steph had to tally up the scores and promised to announce the winner at dinner. At this point I accidently realized I hadn’t asked anything about Adam or Ian, but thankfully there was a tie between two of the groups, so as the tiebreaker questions I was able to incorporate something about both of them in. The winning group was Marina, Stanley and Joe. Overall most the groups did quite well, the highest amount of wrong answers was 6, which isn’t too bad.

At our last family dinner, we were treated to Peking Duck, which is a specialty in Beijing. Although I didn’t try any, it looked as though everybody else thoroughly enjoyed it. That was one of the better dinners I think we had in China and everybody was having a great time. After we all finished eating, Nancy asked us all to think of our best memory or moment in China, but that kind of turned into a “what I learned” statement instead. The whole group was very open and honest during this discussion and it was cool to see everybody’s individual personalities come out, as almost every person took away something different as their most important thing.

And then it was birthday time!! We celebrated Tess and Joes’ birthdays because they were coming up in the next few days but we weren’t going to be together as a group anymore. That was the end of the activities for that day, it was a great way to end an amazing trip and everybody was in high spirits as we all walked out of the restaurant.

Faith is a fourth year students in the Bachelor of Business Administration program.