BEIJING, China – On Wednesday, April 12, a group of students from Mt. Blue High School made the nearly 14-hour journey by plane to China as part of a cultural exchange program. Earlier in the year, a group of Chinese students and their teacher-chaperones were hosted by MBHS and stayed with local Farmington area families.
This MBHS trip to China had been in the works since last year when an earlier Chinese invitation had fallen through due to lack of advanced notice.
“We weren’t given a lot of time to even get passports when we were first invited to China,” said Ruth Haszko who is one of the trip organizers and a French and Spanish language teacher at MBHS.
The trip was then successfully rescheduled to work better with the April vacation timeline. Haszko and her fellow teacher, Gail Carlson, are the two chaperones accompanying the eight participating students. Carlson teaches Sign Language at MBHS.
For many of the students, this is their first time traveling outside the United States. Housing during their nine-day trip was arranged by the teacher’s Chinese counterparts with a combination of hotels for certain days and home stays with host families during the rest. Students did fundraising this past fall and winter to help pay for the roundtrip flight, passport costs, and visitor visa fees. The students include: Michael Gurney (sophomore), Ryan Haszko (sophomore), Ashley Kenney (sophomore), Lilly Kenney (sophomore), Lexi Mittelstadt (freshman), Ashlynn Pease (junior), Sam Smith (sophomore), and Noah Ward-Rubin (sophomore).
Highlights of the trip include a walk atop the Great Wall near Beijing and a visit to Tiananmen Square. From Beijing, the Mt. Blue group will travel to Hangzhou by high-speed rail more commonly known as the “bullet train.”
In Hangzhou, the MBHS students and their chaperones will stay with host families and visit a local school. Hangzhou is the capital of China’s Zhejiang province, and includes West Lake which has been a picturesque subject celebrated by poets and artists since the 9th century. West Lake encompasses islands (reachable by boat), temples, pavilions, gardens, arched bridges, and the Leifeng Pagoda, a modern reconstruction of a structure built in 975 A.D.
After Hangzhou, the group will also travel to Shanghai, on China’s central coast, to tour that city. Shanghai is the China’s biggest city and a global financial hub. It includes a famed waterfront promenade lined with colonial-era buildings as well as a futuristic skyline of 150 skyscrapers, including the Shanghai Tower which stands at over 2,000 feet tall with the world’s highest observation deck.
Congratulations!! Hope you all have a great time!!
What a great opportunity! A lot of work went into getting this organized. Sounds very exciting!
Glad you all made it! Hope you fall in love, as we did, with Hangzhou and Shanghai.
Have fun and travel well.
By the way, the snow in Farmington is almost gone.
Ann Arbor and John Rosenwald
That kind of traveling and learning a new culture is one of the most important experiences a person can have. Learning more about how others live changes people; it builds tolerance, understanding and recognition that despite diversity, there are bonds that connect all. I praise the parents of these kids who despite natural fears of their child being far away knew that it would be one of the best experiences of their high school education. I hope more stories like this will emerge in coming years!
They will never be satisfied remaining in Maine after this trip. This is quite a wide exposure to many things. China is far more advanced than the US on many levels.