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Day 2 Blog Post by Azalea Avila (Electrical Engineering)
April 19th, 2026
Last night we arrived late to Shanghai because of the delays in San Francisco, so we were picked up by a representative named Weiting, who led us to a hotel near the airport. This was something I had never done before so right from the start, I was experiencing a change to what I had experienced in previous travels. We took the bus to make it to the hotel and arrived around 10-11pm. We then gave the front desk our passports… everyone seemed scared about this process, but we did it to receive our rooms, they then gave us a paper with information, that night I became roommates with Cedar! As soon as we made it to our room, we took a shower as we felt extremely dirty and exhausted. Around 1am, we settled down, and I started to watch the news to see if we could get a weather report for the next day. Exhausted from all the travel, we passed out quickly as we had an early wake up in a few hours.
Blog 2 - 5:00 am:
Today, I woke up 30 minutes before my alarm clock and watched tv for a bit before packing up my things around the room, we had to meet downstairs in the hotel lobby no later than 6:30 am to catch our flight to Wenzhou. Wenzhou was where ZGITC (Zhejiang Industry and Trade Vocational College) was. It was supposed to be a partner institution for GTC, and they were supposed to host many of our activities in that city.
Thoughts: I was extremely nervous that morning because we were in a new place and I kept thinking of all the bad things that could go wrong.
At 8:30 am:
We had a group meeting at our flight gate at Shanghai International Airport about the importance of giving a good representation for the college and country, especially in an international program such as this one. The group leaders stressed the importance of the program to us once again.
Thought: I’m very scared about messing up this program for others and myself 😥
8:53 am:
Our whole group boarded on the plane to Wenzhou and a few moments later we were finally seated.
Thought: I feel like this hour will be the longest hour out of all the trips we’ve made in my opinion, but I’m excited to see Wenzhou and to do all the things that are on our agenda. Also, on this flight, we were not allowed to use the bathroom because the flight was just under one hour. I thought was "interesting" because what if I had a stomachache or if I drank a lot of water? Would they open the door?
9:20 am:
We are finally taking off to Wenzhou!!
10:30 am:
We finally made it to Wenzhou!! We’re now making it off the plane to meet with another representative, named Yuyi. Yuyi was a young ZJITC (Zhejiang Industry and Trade Vocational College) representative that I learned from Chinedu had visited GTC with other staff the year before. Once again, it was nice to know we had someone there to help us along the way, but with my travel experience I’ve never seen a representative wait for you when you get off a plane, I’ve only seen it in movies
11:04 am:
We met the representative and we greeted her warmly, we then got onto the bus to head to our hotel, Amy said we would be getting our lunch in our rooms, and everyone was really surprised about this.
Run down for when I stay in a hotel is basically you eat free in the cafeteria or you go buy your own food, point being is that you have to go get your food not them bringing it to you
Thoughts: As we were driving to our hotel, I noted that air drying clothes is super common here. You wouldn’t see this many clothes outside In Kenosha and flowers growing everywhere. I think that’s beautiful.
The mountains here were huge unlike Kenosha and Racine where we have nothing but flat land and farms, my thoughts on Wenzhou… BEAUTIFUL!!
12:04 pm:
We finally made it to our hotel and we took A LOT of pictures everyone was glowing! After getting checked in thanks to the two representatives, Yuyi and Weiting, we made it to our room which had a beautiful view, Cedar and I were put on the 13th floor so we basically could see everything!
Side note: We’re now waiting for our food and we have to eat relatively fast because we have to leave our hotel to Fudong Road Campus of ZJITC (Zhejiang Industry and Trade Vocational College) for a campus tour and cultural experience. This hotel staff brought our food for us and the walked it into the room to deliver and set it up. This I thought was a little "different" lol.
1:00 pm:
My roommate and I got our food and it was great! After we ate, we headed downstairs to the lobby to meet with the others for our tour of the ZJITC Fudong Road Campus which I’m super excited about, as we drove to the school the streets were very lively. Scooters are a big thing here, they even have their own lanes which are the bikes lanes and they are very big and wide. I think in Kenosha, cars are way more popular and the bike lanes are super small and sometimes there is no bike lane
6:00 pm:
We just left Fudong Campus, when we first got there, we were given a tour of traditional embroidery and clay techniques. It was a great experience. Later we did clay paintings of our beloved school Gateway Technical College. It's such a hard technique and I’m really impressed by those there who did an amazing job.
7:54 pm:
We came to the Wenzhou night market, which was filled with people and dim yellow lights, as we walked around to see and explore. The area kind of reminded me of the Hispanic heritage event that Kenosha had one summer; there was music, food, and small items at vendors, but this market had actually stores like an outlet. We also bought a few things, but after a bit we got hungry and stopped at KFC, we had a hard time communicating, but the worker was really nice and had a lot of patience with us and in the end we all ordered our food. The KFC here most definitely has a different taste. The chicken actually tastes like chicken and isn’t dry and white.
Thought: I felt like a monkey using my hands trying to describe to them what I wanted. I took several Traditional Chinese lessons as part of my preparation class for this experience; however, things were different in real time.
8:20 pm:
When we walked out of KFC, Amy was standing outside at a stand, so we walked up to her, after that we met up with Sarah at Starbucks, then we made our way back to our meet up spot. I was very tired and my eyelids were being pulled down to the floor I’ve never felt this tired before.
9:35 pm:
Today's events were wonderful I’ve noticed so many things that Americans do that isn’t done here like air drying your clothes, scooter driving, and keeping old traditions around and even having them in museums, although we had a small inconvenient moments throughout the trip, we pushed through the language barriers with gestures and body language and in the end it didn’t matter because I made new friends with this problem and we survived another day in this beautiful country. Tomorrow is the first official day at GTC's partner school ZJITC.
Thoughts: Nervous yet excited. I am interested in comparing both schools and education systems.
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