Back home

It is hard to realise that this beautiful trip has reached it's final destination, but the realisation slowly takes it's ground. I still have a bit of a jetlag, and yesterdayevening I was conquered by a sudden sleepiness and went to bed at 19:30. Pffffff

After my mother and sister picked me up at the airport on Wednesday, I spent the night at their place. The next day I was quite tired and at the end of the afternoon I took the train back to Delft. Yesterday I found out that I had problems with my internet, that I didn't have enough harddisk space on my pc for all the moviematerial and that I was missing one important cable. I solved each of these problems and started capturing (transferring) my movies to my pc. This morning I finished the capturing and now I can really start with the editing of the movie!

Looking back at this trip, it was an incredible one!
The whole 18 days of this trip have passed unbelievable quickly; our programme gave us a only little time for realisation during the trip. Every day we had a very full programme except for our free day. Since I wanted to visit Peter's family, this free day was also filled. Every other night we had a meeting with all the people form the movie-group. In the beginning it was quite usefull, but in the last week not so usefull anymore.

I would get crazy if I would see more touringcars right now. Every day we had to sit for some hours in our bus, some days more than others. It is not my type of travelling around and in the last days of our trip I produced an aversion against travelling with the touringcar. However, it probably was the most convenient and efficient way of transportation for our specific journey.
Also from an organisational point of view, it was not the best event where I have been to, but I can't blame the leaders who did their utmost best to arrange every aspect in this journey. Probably the most difficult and frustrating was the Chinese burocracy which gave us a lot of unclarities, also one day we had to cancel the programme and on other days we had to shorten some parts of our programme.

More or less one week after the start of our journey, all our boxes with bags, sweatbands(bracelets), sports clothes and balls arrived at the office of the father from Sizhen, one of the other participants. We had distributed already some sweatbands in the first week at one of the schools, but when all the boxes arrived, we were able to hand out much more.
In the last week we have visited two other schools, where we organised some activities. Because of some good connections through Sizhen, this was the kind of clarity we hoped to have had all trhoughout the journey. It was a nice day, without the usual official talk which we started to hate. Many thanks to Sizhen and his father for making this day possible!

We have visited several schools, and got a good image of the education system in Sichuan. We have seen poor public schools, rich public schools and even a private school of which there are only a handful in China. Very surprising is, is that at the private school it is very unlike China. They teach the IB (International Baccalaureate) course system and the children behave like the kids here do, e.g. complaining about all kinds of stuff. We organised a few activities at a summer school taking place at this private school, and it was not easy to motivate these children to cooperate in the game.

During the trip, we visited several tourist attractions, such as a very old irrigation project and a panda center in the first week; of which the latter one was quite impressive. We also payed a visit to a few temples and one museum in the first week.
In the second week we visited another temple, a museum, the biggest Buddha (Leshan Giant Buddha) in the world and climbed Mount Emei (a famous sacred mountain).

Many thanks to all the Dutch and Chinese participants and to the leaders, for giving me this incredible and unforgettable journey!!!
And of course thank you, dear reader, for reading my blog!
Now I really have to start editing. You will have to check out my pics and movie (when I have finished it :P).
Xie xie and Byebye!