By Georgina Hislop

After our very tiring and eventful first week, Beijing was finally over. We helped the boys pack their bags as they didn’t seem to know how to, before lugging our bags full of souvenirs to the coach. We waved goodbye to the guards at the school’s gates, and left to go to the airport.

We didn’t have to hang around too long after we checked in. We all went to Burger King to fill up on familiar food as we didn’t know what to expect for Jiangsu.

The flight was only an hour and a half to Nanjing. However, it was followed by a three hour coach drive with no stops to Changzhou, which is where we would be staying for the next eight days. On the coach there were some Chinese students whom we were paired up with later.

On that first night we stayed in a hotel, a 10 minute drive away from the school. We watched the funny swine flu advert, featuring cartoon pigs, which we could now laugh about as we were no longer in Beijing, in between popping into each other’s rooms and eating!

Early next morning, we left for Changzhou Senior High school. The day started with an opening ceremony followed by pairing us up with our Chinese partners. They were our guides for the week and they were also students at the school. The rest of the morning was spent checking out our dormitories, delighted by the fact there were proper toilets, but disappointed by the lack of curtains on the showers! Ms Buster soon sorted that out for us.

The afternoon was spent in Yan Relic City – a park with ruins. We were expected to walk around the huge place under the extreme sun, but Ms Buster decided to hire an open-air minibus vehicle (only £10) for the entire SMMA group to go on. Mr Bentham refused to come on, saying it was a stupid idea, but all of us went on thankfully. We went round the entire site twice, stopping to take plenty of photos, and played on the wooden playground, before the rest of the Jiangsu group and Mr Bentham had even gone round once!

Every day, breakfast was at 7.00am, and the culture classes started at 8.00am. Everyone in the Jiangsu group was split into four classes. We were in class 3. We spent the morning in the school, doing Chinese and cultural lessons. Each day there were three hours of Mandarin lessons, and 45 minutes of culture classes like tai chi and Chinese paper cutting. We really learnt a lot.

We went on trips to various sites. One day we went to Tianning Pagoda, which is a really tall Buddhist temple, where we climbed to the top. Another day we went to a dumpling factory, where we had to sterilise our hands, wear hats, coats and facial masks and learn how to wrap dumplings. We even got to eat them, thankfully not the ones we made though.

We also spent a day in Suzhou, where we had boat rides and visited the silk factory. They even put on a fashion show for us.

I think everyone agreed that the best two nights of the trip were when we went to Dinosaur Land and for Hotpot Dinner. We had to apply for permission to leave the campus for dinner; luckily Ms. Buster managed to convince our Chinese organisers to approve it, but we had to keep quiet about the “dinner outing” and not tell the other schools who were in our group for this trip.

We skipped dinner that night, then at about 7 we went out. On every table, there was a big pot of soup which was cooking, and then you ordered all these different meats and vegetables and put them in the pot and ate it. It was really fun; we had such a good laugh that night and ended up getting back quite late!

Dinosaur Land was a big theme park with loads of different dinosaur-themed rides. We spit up into two groups and really enjoyed the rides.

It seemed like half a day, but eventually our week in Jiangsu was over, and we flew back to Beijing. They were plenty of tears at the airport as we had grown attached to our new friends. We exchanged contacts and plenty of hugs.

We were worried for most of the flight about going back to the Beijing campus and being locked-down again, and perhaps not being able to go back to London for another week. When we got off the flight, we heard good news; we were staying in a proper hotel, which meant no weird people in spacesuits zapping us with temperature guns.

The hotel was amazing, and we made the most of the fancy facilities, and the excellent breakfasts! As the flight was in the evening, we spent the day in Tiananmen Square, then spending the afternoon in the hotel, before heading back to London on the 13 hour flight.

It was an amazing fortnight and one we’ll never forget.

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