For my final multimedia project, I've decided to take my favorite pictures and caption them. I know my project seems lame compared to everyone else's, but I'm not an artist.

After only eight days in China, I feel that I am a more mature and global person than I was before the trip. It was a humbling experience to be in a place where history goes back thousands of years. Society in China wasn't the opposite of society in this country, but it was completely different. I believe that everyone in our group took something important away from the trip, it would be hard not to. I didn't like how the concept of personal space was absent due to the sheer volume of people in China. Life seemed very public and I imagine it would be hard to live privately. I did like how we were able to visit popular tourist spots as well as the parts of China that normally only see Chinese people. The hike up the Great Wall was my favorite part of the trip. William's story, accomplishments, and life in general made me think about how shallow and plastic my life story will seem compared to his when I'm his age. How many people end up living their childhood dream?

Visiting China opened my world view. I am now far more interested in experiencing foreign cultures than I was prior to the trip. Outside of the United States, I had only been to Tijuana, Montreal, and Aruba before the trip. Nothing I saw in any of those places compares to the things we saw in China.

I still don't understand China. All of its history, culture, and people combine to form the largest nation in the world. Maybe there isn't anything to understand, and China simply is and always has been. I really hope that we never go to war against China. We would probably lose and/or end up launching nukes.

With world peace just far off and wishful thinking, I am interested to see how China's development unfolds in the future. I would like to go back there some day and see more of the country and its culture. We were given a huge opportunity with the China Mojo class and I will remember this trip for the rest of my life.

When we took the bus out of Wuhan City and into the countryside to get to the Yangtze, it felt like we were going back in time. Somewhere around fifty miles outside of Wuhan, the construction trailed off and was replaced by farmland. I didn't see many farming machines, mostly water buffalo pulling plows. They say that China is moving fast toward modernity, and it is. But this change seems only to be happening in the cities and business centers in the country. Subsistence farming wasn't too far outside the busy cities. If China ever fully develops to the point that the United States and other countries are at, where farming is mostly a money-making profession and big business controls the government, it will be by far the most powerful nation in the world. Who knows when that will happen though, it could be hundreds of years before the majority of the minority groups are assimilated into Han society. I'm not sure if it's more important to the Communists that these groups join the main demographic of people in China or preserve their ways of life and continue their unique traditions.

I've been wondering what will happen to the Chinese government as more and more people reach the middle class and become educated. Life is moving so fast over there that they are bound to run into the problems that the United States government is facing now: old politicians stuck in their ways impeding the progress of the nation because they can't keep up with today's fast-paced world.

I wish I had been awake when the boat passed the Three Gorges Dam, but the cruise was still a great experience. The sharp contrast in everyday life between people in the cities and people out in the country showed me that China still has a long way to go before most people are above the poverty line. I wonder if people out in the country even know about life in the cities or about life outside of rural China.

Education is the most important investment for middle and upper-class Chinese. It wasn't hard to see why when we saw all of the city workers sweeping the sidewalks all day, the construction workers in fatigues doing manual labor, and the men pulling carts of bricks down the street by hand. The kids that we had our homestays with were the lucky ones whose parents worked hard to make enough money to send them to the best school in the country. The amount of effort and discipline that we saw from the students was impressive. Eight classes a day and a study period made up a fifteen hour school day for these kids. The only day they got off was Sunday because they had a half day of school on Saturday. I don't think that even private schools in this country have that kind of schedule and I know that I would not have been able to keep up with it when I was fifteen years old. These students have a lot riding on their success in school: their parents money, their family's future, and their own future.

I wrote in my travel journal that Gary and Quincy behaved differently than I would expect people their age to act. I've come to the conclusion that the pressure from school and their lifestyle in general have shaped them. I noticed that, at least with the kids Erik and I stayed with, music wasn't very important to them. We asked them what kind of music they liked to listen to and didn't get a straight answer. Music is an important part of most young people's lives here in the states and it surprised me that this didn't seem to be true in China as well. In this country, music is an important outlet for political, social, and cultural commentary and opinions. I wonder if the government has something to do with the lack of interest in music in China. Then again, Andrew said that Chinese music wasn't very good right now.

Our trip to China is hard to describe in words, so I'll save that for later.

The amount of construction going on in the cities in China is impressive. The rows of apartment buildings were the most interesting to me. I heard that some of them were completely empty, I think Steve Wilmarth said that, and that people would invest in the buildings like they would the stock market and never end up living in them. Steve also said that China was a “debt-free country.” This was really interesting as well because our country basically runs on borrowed money these days, from the people all the way up to the government. I was watching the news on CCTV, the only Chinese television station broadcast in English, and it was reported that the top twenty percent of people in China were in possession of eighty percent of the nation's wealth. I'm not sure whether or not the reason for this is capitalism. I would like to see some statistics about how many people move into the cities each year. There seems to be enough room in the cities for more people, but probably not many more large vehicles.

The traffic was crazy. I couldn't figure out if there were traffic laws or not, but there appeared to be none except stopping at red lights. I would have loved to go driving in and around Wuhan (it wasn't as exciting in Beijing), where people weaved in and out of traffic and dodged each other and people on the streets, just to see how well I'd do. It wasn't that the people were bad drivers, it was more that they were driving in such an open system that ability to stay in a lane was almost irrelevant. I was surprised that we didn't see any accidents happen on the road.

Multimedia Storytelling Plan

1. Which media environments and technologies/applications/platforms will I use in documenting and telling the story of my China trip?

I haven't decided exactly what I'm going to do yet, but my documentation will definitely include pictures taken on the trip.

2. What equipment/gear will I need to bring to capture my stories?

The only things I will need are a camera and a notebook.

3. How will I capture and "bottle" my stories while traveling in China?

I am going to save the pictures on the SD card in my camera and write down what was going on when I took them in a notebook.

4. Please provide a "sample example" of your multimedia approach here.

Pre-trip Reflection

I don't know much about China. My world history class in high school barely mentioned Asia and I don't care for politics so I don't read much into the media. The way things are going though, I do know that China will eventually pass the United States as the world's top consumer as well as economic and, as a result, political power. I know that the Chinese built the railroads that connected the east and west coasts of this country. That's about it.

The thing that I would most like to know about China is what they think about the United States and its people. In a country with censored and controlled media, I wonder how much of the outside world is actually available to the people. I would also like to learn more about what everyday life is like in China from the countryside to the cities. I imagine life there is similar to life here, but there are obvious and unknown differences that I would like to see for myself. I also have an interest in China's government structure. There is a reason that China has been relatively poor until recently and there is also a reason that it is growing in economic strength. My first guess at what caused this change would be government. Another subject that I would like to learn more about is China's energy consumption and pollution statistics. I've been wondering for a while now what China will do with its rising energy usage and industrialization. There are so many people there that they can't afford to pollute the air too badly but there is so much fuel being burned that it seems unavoidable. The United States (and I assume the rest of the modern world) is heading toward clean energy and technology. This technology might not be available or affordable in China and the Chinese will run into environmental problems as we have. I'm interested to see what they end up doing about it because I've seen the green movement in this country cause a shift in focus in various technological fields.