A group of Monmouth College students, led by faculty members Kristin Larson, Ian Moschenross and Joan Wertz, discovered that it’s quite another to actually walk among the people of China and look out over the country from the historic Great Wall.

"Being on the Great Wall was utterly amazing," said Tim Seyller, a sophomore from Hampshire, who was one of 17 MC students who took the one-week trip. "I kept thinking to myself, ‘Am I actually here?’ I couldn’t believe it. It was the highlight of the trip for me. It’s so breathtaking and wonderful. You can see the mountains around the wall. And the wall itself was so fun to walk. Sometimes it was flat and easy, and other times it was very steep."

"Honestly, it was by far the most humbling and exhilarating experience of my life," added Laura Dumont, a sophomore from Chicago. "I really cannot put into words how utterly impressed I was by the sheer sight of it."

The group, which left Chicago on Jan. 3 and flew 13.5 hours straight through to Beijing, spent time in that city, which will host the 2008 Olympic Summer Games, as well as Xi’an and Shanghai. They saw many of the major tourist sites, including the Forbidden City, but it was their interactions with the Chinese people that many will remember most.

"One night, we had dinner with a local family of modest means," said Moschenross, an assistant professor of music. "It was a small house, and there was no heat. But it was good for our students to see."

Added Larson, who is an assistant professor of psychology, "We rode in a rickshaw to get to the house, which was in a traditional Hutong neighborhood. There are buildings on three sides with a courtyard in front. Two, three and even four families might share a building. The government is tearing them down to build high rises. We were fortunate to be in a preserved neighborhood. It was the standard of living that most people in China experience, and most don’t have indoor plumbing."

The meal that the MC group ate that night was consistent with their diet for the trip’s entirety.

Of the 17 students, 11 were psychology students of Larson and Wertz, and the other six were music majors. All the students, who were required to keep journals and received two credit hours for the experience, met during the fall semester in advance of the trip. Larson’s students met every other week for about two hours to go over some of the cultural differences they might experience, tackling them from a psychological point of view. They also tried to learn some key Chinese phrases, though they found their Americanized attempts at speaking the language in China were largely unsuccessful.

Besides the family dynamic, which the group was able to observe firsthand at their Hutong meal, another element that fascinated Larson was "individualism vs. collectivism." That point was really driven home during a morning visit to a Beijing park.

"It was filled with hundreds and hundreds of retired people during various forms of morning exercise," said Moschenross. "Some were doing tai-chi, some were ballroom dancing. Some were singing or playing music, and others were badminton or ping pong. And it was cold, around 30-35 degrees."

"There were 65-year-olds playing hacky-sack, and they were singing in makeshift choirs," said Larson. "It was the neatest thing to observe. It made so much more sense to me than the way we exercise here, which is very individualized. We put on our headphones and want to be left alone."

"I realized instantly from this experience that only a collectivist society could produce this beautiful moment because only members of a collectivist society would feel so compelled to wake up just to be around others in their community," said Dumont. "The workout experience in America is more about each individual obtaining or reaching some personal fitness goal whereas the morning exercises in China are about engaging with the community."

Dumont said that another trip highlight was meeting the farmer in Xi’an who in 1974 discovered the now-famous Terracotta Warriors, while Larson said the students also enjoyed a visit to a middle school.

"Our students were pretty impressed that these 12-year-old students could carry on a conversation in English with them," she said. "After about 10 minutes, the young students really warmed up to our group. They wound up exchanging e-mail addresses and planned to be electronic pen pals."

Moschenross also said the group also attended a "really great" dinner theater with traditional Chinese classical music. He noted the Monmouth contingent was provided with a tour guide in each of the three major cities they visited.

"The tour guides were amazing," said Larson. "They were able to share a great deal of information regarding history, economics and politics. When we were able to speak with them one-on-one, we learned a little bit more about what it was like to live in a Communist society."

Added Larson, "We’re going again in 2011. We’d like to take the trip on a three-year rotation so that every student at Monmouth has an opportunity to go."

"The trip in general was so much fun," said Seyller. "I became friends with a lot of new people that I had never talked to at school. We saw new things, learned new things, tried new things. It was by far a wonderful learning experience, and one that I will remember for a long time to come."