CAPA WORLD

In this post, Nicole talks about her experience visiting Guilin, a city in central China, and how this trip led her to connect with nature.

It wasn’t until the trip to Guilin that I realized my love for nature and how happy I was to be in China. Known for its unique landscape of limestone karst hills, Guilin is a city of world renown natural beauty. 

The Guilin trip, organized by East China Normal University, invited all international students to explore the beautiful scenery of the Guangxi Zhuang region. After a nine-hour ride in the bullet train, we started our adventure. We visited the Elephant Trunk, the Longji Terrace, Xingping Town, the Lijiang River, but my favorite place was the Gudong Waterfall.

In this week's vlog, Daniel takes you along on this once-in-a-lifetime experience where he and the rest of the CAPA Shanghai cohort make the break by taking a hike up to the top of the Great Wall of China!

In this week's vlog, Rachel Epp takes us along for the ride on an amazing 3-day excursion to Beijing, China, where she and other CAPA students see the Summer Palace and Forbidden City, and then take a long hike up one of the seven wonders of the world, the Great Wall of China. 

After a busy week at his internship, CAPA official vlogger Dan Powell takes you through a relaxing weekend in Shanghai. Between exploring parks near campus and staying fit, watch for ideas on how to maintain balance in your life while studying abroad.

From being a small town girl in a big city, to being a Christian in a highly secular country, Rachel gets real about how her personal and religious identities play out in China vs the US and how she reconciled these differences by finding a community.

In this week's post,Dan Powell takes us along to show us what another week in the life of a student Shanghai looks like. This week, he goes on an excursion to Suzhou, encounters a dance party in a local park, and goes on a run. 

“Connecting Global Cities” is a monthly column written by Colin Speakman, Resident Director for CAPA Shanghai.

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Sister Cities are sometimes referred to as “Twin Cities” but that term has another meaning as well. In USA, it is used to refer to two cities of similar size that are geographically close together. Two examples which I have visited a few times are the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul (in Minnesota) and San Francisco and Oakland (in California). Some are twins across a border and quite close to it—San Diego in USA and Tijuana in Mexico (I have visited them too). The term is also used in other countries. Sometimes such twin cities lose their individual identities and merge.

Photo credit: Colin Speakman

Budapest in Hungary, which began as two cities (Buda and Pest) twinned merged in 1873 to become a united city. Where I live in China I have several friends from the city of Wuhan; I wonder if they learn that Wuhan was created in 1927 from no less than three neighboring “tri-cities” of Hankou, Hanyang, and Wuchang. We can see where “WuHan” came from combining parts of each city.

In this week's vlog, Rachel Epp documents a CAPA group excursion to Suzhou, where students explore the city's notoriously beautiful gardens, canals, shops, and restaurants!

In this week's post, Dan Powell discusses his social media marketing internship in Shanghai and takes us on his commute to his work.

In honor of Golden Week, a seven day long national holiday in China, Rachel uses her week off to experience some fun tourist spots in Shanghai.