After our arrival in Beijing, China’s capital, we will depart the city for a small village below a remote and un-renovated section of the Great Wall. Within hiking distance of the wall, we stay in a small family-owned guesthouse here and begin getting to know one another, learning about ensuring our health and safety during the course, and get a sense of where and how we’ll spend the next several weeks together. After taking advantage of the quiet and natural beauty of the village, we board a bus to travel back to the city of Beijing and spend a couple of days exploring some of the many historical and cultural treasures it has to offer. One of our goals on this program is to steer clear of the most common tourist destinations, but Tiananmen Square, the largest public square in the world and site of a long list of major events in contemporary Chinese history, makes for a worthwhile stop during our Beijing time.

Next, we board a flight headed southwest to Kunming in Yunnan province known as the land “south of the clouds.” For now, Kunming is a stopover on our way to our rural home-stay village in western Yunnan – an area called Lashihai, about an hour by road from the town of Lijiang. Here, we settle into the routine that we keep for most of the remainder of our time together. We meet our wonderful language teachers who will assess students and divide the group into small classes according to language levels. Each weekday morning until lunchtime we attend class, focusing on listening and conversation skills that we can use immediately with our host families and daily interactions. In the afternoons, we spend time helping with household and farm chores with our families and exploring the area as a group. Lashihai is an ethnically Naxi area and in addition to Chinese, many Naxi people also speak the Naxi language and maintain strong cultural traditions. Host families live in traditional wooden homes built around cobblestone courtyards and this is one of the few places in China where many older people still wear traditional dress. Experiential learning activities and trips during our afternoons and weekends may include visiting a large Tibetan Buddhist monastery just a bike ride away, short treks to nearby ethnically Yi villages, or a day trip to Lijiang to learn about its status as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

It’s usually difficult to say goodbye to our home-stay families in the village, but after over a week living in the community it’s time to move on to experience a very different lifestyle back in the city of Kunming. We arrive by train (a fun travel experience in itself!) and meet our new homestay families here. Kunming is sometimes called the “City of Eternal Spring” because of its mild weather, clean air (especially relative to other cities in China) and abundant native plants and flowers. In Kunming, we continue with our weekday morning language classes with our trusted teachers and expand our language lessons to bustling markets and city excursions. Classes are held in our Kunming Program House, a comfortable space where we meet each morning, attend class, and host guest speakers on a wide variety of topics. In the afternoons, students also work on Independent Study Projects (ISPs) taking advantage of our strong network of contacts and mentors in the city from having run programming in Kunming for over 3 decades. ISPs can take on all different forms, from studying an aspect of traditional culture (e.g. calligraphy, a martial art, dance, a musical instrument, tea culture) to more academic research on Chinese history or social issues, to a creative photography or even a writing project. The ISP is a wonderful way for students to explore and personalize the program to their interests. Evenings and weekends are spent with host families – the best opportunity of all to practice language and experience day-to-day life with a Chinese family.

Over the course of our travels, the instructors gradually step back to allow the group to take more leadership and control over the daily activities. This student empowerment progression culminates with the group planning and leading a multi-day excursion under the mentorship and supervision of their instructors. Full of new skills, experiences, and memories, we spend our last few days together reflecting on our time together and preparing for the transition back home.