On Dec. 10, 2024, Principal Mitch Gross forwarded a message about Shijiazhuang Foreign Language School’s opportunity for 30 students and three accompanying chaperones to spend spring break in China. To be eligible to attend, students needed a passport and to pay $200 for the trip. Shijiazhuang Foreign Language School, a sister school to City High, paid for the cost of flights, accommodations and meals during the stay. The application required a 200-300 word paragraph describing why they wanted to attend the trip and why they should be accepted. 

After reviewing over 300 applications district-wide, the ICCSD sent an email announcing Ali Mohamed ’26, Anjali Lodh ’25, Anna Song ’25, Finnley Bonfig ’26, Greyson Reed ’25, Junze Sun ’25, Kellen Craig ’26, Mariah Bruening ’26 and Sidney Westgard ’25 as the selected West representatives. The chaperones selected to accompany them were West counselor Kelly Bergmann and science teacher Sarah Long. 

For some, the trip offered more than an inexpensive international travel opportunity. 

“I’m half Chinese and half Indian, so I felt pretty disconnected from my culture. I felt like it would be really beneficial to visit China up close and see a part of myself that I haven’t really fully realized yet. I got a chance to meet my relatives for the first time in seven years,” Lodh said.

Because Bonfig didn’t have any previous relationship with Chinese culture, she was especially excited to travel abroad and experience a foreign country 

“I wanted to go because I have never left this continent, and it was a great opportunity that I thought was going to be a lot of fun,” Bonfig said. “I had a blast, aside from the flights. They’re just really long, and that was kind of a struggle, but everything else that we did was really fun.”

Lodh agrees, noting that adjusting to a new schedule was difficult but worth it when she arrived. 

“[Traveling] was definitely tough, but once we got there, every single day was packed with stuff, and it was really go, go, go, which was nice because I wouldn’t have planned that for myself,” Lodh said.

After almost 30 hours of traveling, the group arrived in Beijing, China. From there, students traveled to Shanghai and Hebei, visiting tourist attractions like national landmarks, while also getting special access to some government buildings. 

“We did pretty typical sightseeing activities,” Lodh said. “Then, we got special access to go to the Great Hall of the People, which is the equivalent of the White House. We hiked the Great Wall. In Shanghai, we visited the Bund, which is the lakeside skyscraper downtown. We visited the Old Town, which is a big shopping market district.”

In addition to visiting tourist attractions, students attended two Chinese high schools. There, they experienced the Chinese education system alongside a Chinese student from Shijiazhuang Foreign Language School, who they traveled with after meeting in Beijing.

“The school was really cool to go to,” Westgard said. “They had an underground ping pong place, an ice rink for hockey and a ski hill. I took a calligraphy class, and we learned how to make dumplings, and we ate our own dumplings.”

For Lodh, visiting the schools was a highlight of the trip.

“My favorite part of the trip was meeting and interacting with the Chinese students from the high schools there, because it was really cool to see cultural differences, how their school differs from ours and to talk to them to see how many more similarities we have,” Lodh said. 

Bonfig agrees, citing how she was surprised by how much she had in common with the Chinese students.

“I was really stressed that the kids that we met were going to be completely unrelatable, because it’s such a different culture, but they were so funny. Teenage problems are teenage problems everywhere,” Bonfig said. “[My partner] is very easy to relate to, even though they don’t have [our] social media. She was a lot easier to interact with and get to know than I thought it was going to be.”

Like Bonfig, one of Westgard’s highlights of the trip was interacting with his Chinese partner.

“I was incredibly surprised at how good [my partner] was at English. He pulled out words like compulsory, a lot of crazy words I wouldn’t expect them to know,” Westgard said. “I went to his house, so I got to meet his entire family. That was really interesting; that somebody from another country has gone through a totally different experience.”

Lodh agrees, emphasizing that despite language and cultural differences, she found more common ground than she expected. 

“There was definitely a little bit of a language barrier at first. They’ve been learning English for a long time, but some of them said it was hard for them to understand us,” Lodh said. “It was cool to be able to talk to each other in English, and I even learned some phrases in Chinese. It was nice to see how much in common we had as teenagers and the universal experience [not] separated by culture.”

Because the Chinese government sponsors trips like this, Bonfig encourages other students to attend the program if they get the chance. 

“It’s [the Chinese government’s] initiative, and they’re going to bring 50,000 American kids. Our trip was only the 1,000th group of kids, so I know there’s going to be more,” Bonfig said. “If anybody has the chance, it’s a crazy experience, because it was nothing that I expected, and it was so much better than I thought it was going to be.”

In late June, the Shijiazhuang Foreign Language School will be hosting another trip for ICCSD high school students. For this trip, Waad Dafalla ’26, Jasmine Tsang ’26, Omnia Ali ’25, Sylvia De Young ’26, Iarafa Dirar ’26, Daniel Oluwadarasimi ’27, Muawia Badri ’27, William Lyons ’26, Mohammed Elmahi ’27 and Jack Twait ’25 were selected as the 10 West students to attend.