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Editor’s note – Sung Hoon Kang is a 14-year-old 9th-grader who attends Sussex Tech and the Academic Challenge enrichment program at Delaware Tech. He was born in South Korea and now lives with his family in Laurel.
This summer I went on a trip to China. I traveled through Beijing, Hong Kong, Wuzhen and other places. I traveled with the group called People to People, an organization that allows student ambassadors to travel to other countries. This was my second year of traveling; the first time of traveling with the group was to Europe last year. The trips always include a home stay where we stay with a local family in the country we visit, and a different delegation manager who helps us get around the country and explains to us the different foreign cultures that we experience in each trip. We also get to meet other kids from other parts of the United States and travel in groups with them. During this trip I kept a travel journal about everything that happened.
June 17 - First day of my journey
I’ve been preparing several months for this trip, ever since I was told this year’s trip was to China. Today I woke up not so early in the morning ready to head to the airport to fly off to China. Like the year before, the airport was in Philadelphia, which was a grueling four-hour car ride away. This year we gave another kid from my travel group a lift to the airport. With a tearful good-bye from the parents of our group we boarded the airplane to Texas then to Los Angeles then Hong Kong and finally to our final destination of Beijing. The flights are long and arduous, but at least it finally made me read.
June 18
On this day we arrived in Hong Kong - at least I believe that a day has passed. Because of crossing time zones I’m not too sure of dates but I’ll just use this. Our group from Delaware had merged with two other groups from Utah and Pennsylvania, and the number of kids is looking very large. Right now getting off the plane, I am feeling angry and frustrated that the flights are taking so long. I couldn’t believe there was one more flight until I got to actually lie down. We had to wait in the Hong Kong airport for about an hour until our flight to Beijing, and one of the most important rules was told to me here; we are not allowed to drink any of the water from the sinks in China or anywhere else. Compared to the other groups, our group from Delaware was less paranoid about China and was more relaxed. Their leaders stressed every little danger every time. Our leader told us the danger and just reminded us from time to time, which I believe worked. On the other hand, the other kids were much tenser about our trip, asking if they could drink even coffee from a Starbucks or wash their hands with the bathroom water. We then boarded the plane to Beijing, which I thought was going to be a short flight, but ended up taking four hours. I had flown approximately 22 hours before arriving in Beijing. To make it worse our luggage was missing when we arrived in Beijing because of one flight delay in Texas! The kids from Utah all had their luggage, but the kids from our group and Pennsylvania had to go a day without our luggage and a spare change of clothes. So, today I had to deal with flying, infected water and lost luggage.
June 19
Today is the day where we actually started to explore the wonders of China. Today we went to a courtyard, which was the form of a house used in China. On the way there we traveled on carts pulled by men. The house is basically a square with a yard in the center of it. It was interesting to see this kind of building because ever since the revolution, these houses are being torn down to be replaced by apartment buildings. Several interesting facts about these buildings - a whole family usually lives here, or even two families. There is no indoor plumbing, and the bathroom is a hole outside. In the yard was a pomegranate tree, which, according to tradition, helps the family have a boy, while the Phoenix helps the family have girls. Later, I climbed very steep stairs up a tower, much like the arch of triumph, to watch a drum performance. The drums were about twice as tall as a person and so much thicker. We then went to the Tiananmen Square. I never heard of Tiananmen Square before; I only heard about the tank boy and the giant picture of Mao and I was quite surprised that this was the place. I couldn’t get a good look at Mao’s picture because of all the haze in the air. Today I noticed how polluted China actually is. So far every day is dark and the skies are dark with smog. After exploring what is in Tiananmen Square, such as where Mao is on display, we went to the Forbidden City.
This city is the most impressive thing I have ever seen in my life. Not just in the building but everything else; the moat surrounding the palace was huge and deep and the dirt that they dug up to build the moat was used to create huge mountains. The palace had many courts that connected to other courts.
June 20
Today was the most anticipated part of the trip; today was the day we got to see the Great Wall of China. During the long bus ride there, I noticed a lot of things. There is a great difference between the cities of China and the country. In the country almost everyone is a farmer, but in the city no one is a farmer. A phrase used by the farmers in China is that, “An ugly house, ugly clothes and an ugly wife make a happy man.” Well, when we arrived at the Great Wall, it was far from what I expected from seeing postcards of the majestic wall stretching across mountains and rivers, traveling the land like a snake. We only saw a very small part of the wall, and it was mostly a stair up a mountain. This section is the Juyongguan Section of the Great Wall. It was very long and tall, and I could not manage to get to the top. We measured the height we traveled by counting the towers along the way. I could only climb seven towers and just that was very high. The steps were strangely uneven and tall. We then went to a cloisonné factory where they make pots and plates with metal work technique. The technique is used to decorate pots, vases and other decoration. The process is long and arduous, but to sum it up, first the design for the pot or vase is chosen and the artist bends a metal frame of the design and attaches it to the product. Then the product is painted with using the frame as a guide, and it is baked in an oven. That last step is repeated many times. After the factory we visited a Shaolin martial arts school. The students there gave us a performance of their skills, and it was quite amazing. It was like a kung fu movie where the actors flew in the air with kicks and punches. The kids were flying in the air and landing like a feather. They showed us their skills with different weapons and their impressive jump height. According to one of them they can jump up to two meters in the air, which is about seven feet. Today’s dinner was the local delicacy, Peking Duck, and the exploration of the public bathrooms of China, which gave a choice in using a toilet bowl or literally, a hole in the ground.
Part 2
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