News
VCS Summer Trips Abroad: China and Spain
Vermont Commons has offered instruction in Mandarin Chinese since 2007, but, as the Chinese proverbs say, "One hundred stories is not the same as one visit." So this summer instructors Zhenyan Li and Ben Patrick are traveling to China with eight VCS students!
The three-week itinerary includes visits to Beijing, the capital city of China, and the Sichuan Province. The group will tour museums and important historical and cultural sites including the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Qingcheng Mountain, Emei Mountain, the Giant Buddha, Jinsha Museum, the Dujiangyan irrigation project, a panda reserve, and Ancient Chinese towns. Students will also have home stays with Chinese families and spend a few days with high school and college students in Sichuan Province experiencing the delicious Sichuan cuisine and teaching English at the New Oriental Language Training School in China.
Read the latest blog entry from China.
While Zhenyan's and Ben's group are touring China, another group of nine intrepid VCS students will be traveling in Spain for five weeks with instructor Jordan Romm. This is the longest international trip ever undertaken by VCS.
The Spain trip will begin with six days in a rural house in Galicia, a beautiful region in northwestern Spain. They will then travel to Tordesillas (about two hours north of Madrid) where students will be placed with individual families for a three-week home stay. From Tordesillas, the group will travel to the Pyrenees for a three-day hiking trip led by two guides from Barcelona. They will do village-to-village hikes along the border between France and Spain, staying in a series of cabins nestled among the largest peaks in the Pyrenees. The trip will conclude with five days in Barcelona and the surrounding area. The focus of the trip will be language acquisition. With perseverance, students can expect to learn a great deal about Spanish culture and vastly improve their conversational Spanish.
Read the latest blog entry from Spain.