Written by Shelly Danley

May 23.  Today was another exciting day in China! Today was our last day of classes here at Chengdu Sport University. After another early breakfast we went to our last TCM class, where we got to see all Chinese herbs used in traditional medicine and learned about the practice of cupping. Cupping is a therapy in which a jar is attached to the skin’s surface to cause local congestion through the removal of the air in the jar created by introducing heat in the form of an ignited material. After learning about the techniques we got to practice cupping on each other. It was a lot of fun and we all now have big round bruises on our backs from all the practicing! As our final class drew to an end we presented Professor Gao with an “Ithaca is Mei Li” shirt as a thank-you for working with us this past week. We also gave the Chinese students who had been helping us in the class HSHP pins as a thank-you gift.

We spent the short amount of time between the end of TCM class and Wushu to talk with the new friends we had made among the Chinese students in the TCM class. We then headed over to the track for our final Wushu class. In the class we reviewed everything that we had learned throughout the week and then we all performed the Kung Fu sequence we had learned in pairs for Professor Yang. During class we also played Ultimate Frisbee with everybody, including Hongwei and Nick. It was so much fun and many of the Chinese students were really good for their first time! The game ended up in a tie even though Hongwei would say his team won. Hongwei is an extremely aggressive player and sometimes played dirty, knocking myself and all the other girls on my team to the ground while pulling the Frisbee out of our hands. He really wanted to win, but it was really fun despite Hongwei’s cheating! At the end of class we presented Professor Yang with a shirt as well and took a group photo.

After lunch and our rest period we went to the Jinsha Museum. The museum included two different buildings that included artifacts and dig sites where they unearthed the artifacts from the ancient culture of the Shu Kingdom from 3,000 years ago. Many of the relics were really well preserved and really beautiful. We then returned to CSU’s campus for dinner.

After dinner we went to Chunxi Commercial Road. This road was really a series of streets that is a much larger version of the Ithaca Commons, but with lights more like Las Vegas. We look through some of the stores and a mall, which was a little overwhelming because there were so many people and so many things to look at. On our way back to the bus Kelly begged Hongwei to let us stopped at McDonalds so that she could get some “American food”; which she devoured! We then took another group photo before the bus arrived to take us back to the university.

Once back at the university, we had a party with all the Chinese students we had met here at CSU. At the party we got a cake for Cathy, since her 21^st birthday is on Monday (but we are leaving Monday morning so we won’t be able to celebrate on the actual day). She was really touched by the cake and we all enjoyed eating it, it was delicious! We also wanted to teach the Chinese students a typical game that Americans play at parties, so we modified a drinking game and played water pong. It was a lot of fun and even the Dean, Hongwei and Nick played a game of water pong, which got really competitive! Hongwei again was really aggressive but the Dean held his own against him, the Dean even hit Hongwei in the face with one of his shots! It was a great night that gave everyone a fun time to hang out one last time before we left Chengdu, since we are going to be sight-seeing all day tomorrow. It was definitely a day I will never forget!