The Gaoxin School's Welcoming Ceremony

Ayden Writes:

For today’s blog entry, I will be writing about the welcoming ceremony. Last week a group of kids from Sharon came to Xi’an. The Gaoxin School (the school I live in) prepared a performance for us. Usually the welcoming happens is when the exchange students arrive; but we had to wait for the Sharon High School kids to get to Xi’an. The Chinese students put on many different acts. All of the acts were phenomenal.

First there were a couple of speeches, then there was a chorus singing. The chorus sounded so so good. After the chorus, we watched a few dancers doing Chinese dances. The dancers were wearing really funky traditional outfits. After the dancers, a student did Kung Fu. He was so amazing at Kung Fu that he scared me. Next the kids from Brookline High School read a poem in Chinese. Then the kids from Sharon sang a song, they sang Edel Weiss.

We were the last ones to perform in the welcoming ceremony. We did a dance. Usually the Brookline High kids do something lame, but this year they decided to do something better. I thought the dance was great and everyone else thought so too. The dance was to a song all about how “everyone” now is learning Chinese. The Chinese people had to “to twist their tongue” to study English but now it our learn to “twist our tongues”. The song we did the dance to was called Jungo Hua ( which means “the Chinese language” ). It was really fun learning the dance. Even though the song was in Chinese, we did a super job.

Gavi Writes:

Hey Everyone,
Today was pretty much a normal day. I went to Chinese school in the morning. Then I came home and had a quick lunch and hung out with the Brookline High students. Then we all went up to my parents dorm room to watch the tape of our Zhong Guo Hua dance that we preformed at our belated welcoming ceremony. The dance was basically most of us doing “background dancing” which was a bunch of simple moves repeated over and over again, while Jenna, Mickey and Joe went crazy throwing themselves around in front. We had a blast actually watching what we looked like. After watching the dance we watched the first hour of “China a Century of Revolution” which is a PBS documentary that covers everything we have studied in Chinese history for the past two months. Then we all had these Chinese desserts that Feng Lao Shi (the teacher who came to Boston) brought back for us from her hometown on the countryside. They were buns made of flakey dough that had, what tasted like, nuts and cinnamon sugar inside. They were absolutely delicious! After the movies we went back downstairs and had Chinese class. Then we had our first kung fu class with our new uniforms. I defiantly felt 100 times more powerful in my bright blue, silk outfit then I do in my usual jeans and t-shirt!
So overall, it was really just another day here in Xi’an.

More later,
Gavi