Students We Met During Immersion
Here, at the Nanjing school, we met a lot of new friends from China. We even attended some of their lessons. Through those lessons, we got to see how the China students study and what kind of environment they study in. We attended lessons like English, Mathematics, Geography, Music and History. It was a good experience as most of these lessons were conducted in Chinese and we seldom have lessons like these conducted in Chinese.
Every morning, the China students will do morning exercise. It is very interesting as they did it all together and they did it very seriously. It was a very amazing sight as in Singapore, we have never seen a school where everybody did morning exercises seriously and synchronously.
The girl's at the school we visited hold their hands as a symbol of good friendship and trust. We find this very interesting as in Singapore, it is not a social norm to hold the same gender's hand and walk publicly. When they walk to the canteen or another place, the girl's who are good friends with each other would hold each other hands and wouldn't let go until they reach the destination. This also shows other people that this two people or so are good friends.
We played Motor boats with the China students. They were very good at it as they usually do this because it is their CCA. We find it very interesting as their CCA is catching butterflies, racing motor boats, Chinese chess and so on. The China students did not go easy on us and for most of the rounds, they won. Although we lost, we were still very happy as we got to race with the China students and it was a once-in-a-blue-moon event.
Everyday, the China students have to queue up for their food. The queue can go as far as outside the canteen. Although it was a long queue, their break is 45 minutes and the food is free. We did not get to queue with the students as we could get our food from the Teacher's lounge and it was faster as there was only the teachers and students from our school.
On the last day, we had different classes perform an item for everyone. For 2J, they sang "Home" and for 2F they did a skit on Sanila Utamah. The China students singing and dancing was beautiful. We felt that they must have put in a lot of effort to put up that item for us as a goodbye. It left a deep impression on us and we will never forget what the China students did for us. It was sad bidding them goodbye as we had formed friendships with a lot of the students there. Although it was a sad thing, it must be done and thus after bidding all our new friends goodbye, we left the school.
One of the most beautiful quality of friendship is that they never forget one another