Focus Week: Hakka trip

Simply the best focus week EVER.

The biking experience was perhaps the best part. Around 80km in total over 4 days, through the beautiful countryside. The rush from the physical exertion fit perfectly with the freedom of the scenery.

We stayed at one of those "tulou" (土楼）, the cylindrical ancient Hakka fortress-come-apartment-complex structures, and we visited a whole bunch of them around the area.

We learned about tea-leaf manufacture.

We taught English at a local school. The performance, however, wasted almost half of the time we had available. Why did we have to teach the kids a song to perform?

In our free time, we played cards.

I and the boys who I shared a dorm with, Derek and Calvin Lee, woke early every morning, before 6am. I don't like not being up before the other people.

We watched a puppet show.

For the entire 6 days of the trip, my mind was pleasantly blank, relaxed, taking a break from routine life. Pure bliss.

Now, let my just copy-paste what I put in my CAS self-evaluation, 'cause I can't be bothered thinking of it all again:

I discovered that I have to take a little bit of time to think before I speak in Putonghua.

My biking ability was beyond what I expected, though I believe I made up for lack of technical control with brute strength.

I was, however, unable to do the writing and homework I intended to do on the trip. Instead, my mind was in a state of perpetual relaxation and calmness. I also, unfortunately, got homesick after the first 4 days.

Nonetheless, I still count the trip a success in increasing my awareness of my own boundaries.

I have never in my life biked for 50km in a day. That was definitely a new challenge, and an exciting one.

Teaching the children English didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, though. For one, there pre-existing English levels were much lower than what I and my fellow group members had expected. Yet, that is but a testament to our inexperience at this new challenege.

Because we had overestimated the students abilities, our group had to replan our lessons from scratch. Although we sometimes got distracted from planning by invitations to play cards, we were able to recover from the initial setback and plan successful lessons that taught the kids a little bit of basic English.

I worked with Matt Tung, Derek, and Calvin Lee. Although the teaching was initially awkward, we worked well together.

Indeed, nobody there knew an int of English, not even the school headmaster.

I don't think our short stay contributed to any sort of dilution of local culture. In fact, it was more of a learning experience for them, since the students had never before met anyone from outside the area, as well as a learning experience for us.

I learned that teaching English as a second language is much more difficult than I thought; first language students inevitably pick up the material much faster as it is natural to them.

Picking tea leaves was one of the high points of the trip. We learned to find newly opened leaves and pick cuttings from these leaves to three leaves beneath them for the best maturity and thus taste.

Edit (March 25, 2011): Damn, those were good times...