China Bridge Winter Program Overview
Over break, 51 Cornell students, including 13 CAPS majors, visited China at the invitation of Hanban, the Chinese government’s language council and Confucius Institute sponsor. Over the course of three weeks, CAPS students had a chance to visit Beijing (1 week) and Hangzhou (2 weeks). Highlights of the Beijing portion of our trip included visits to the Forbidden City, Great Wall, 798 Art Zone, Olympic sites, Beijing Science and Technology Museum, Peking University and Tsinghua University.
During our two-week stay at Zhejiang University’s Yuquan campus in Hangzhou, we took Chinese classes in addition to attending lectures on various topics and participating in taiji classes. Highlights of our stay in Hangzhou included visits to the Wuzhen historic water town, Coca-Cola and Wahaha factories, Leifeng Pagoda, Chinese Medicine Museum, Hu Xueyan Residence, and various historic streets. A few CAPS majors also took a one-day trip to Shanghai, where they got a chance to visit the Oriental Pearl TV Tower and tour historic gardens.
The program concluded with an elaborate closing ceremony, during which us CAPS students had a chance to show off our new taiji, singing and dancing skills. We were even served sea cucumber soup at the final banquet, which proved that 海参 (remember MBD 12?) can have real-life applications.
The CAPS students would like to offer a special thank-you to the CAPS faculty and staff for helping to make this trip possible.
What a fantastic experience and I think it’s fantastic that China is now involved in so many exchange and other programs such as this. This is something that will stay with these young people forever and travel really does open the mind.