Day+10+May+31

**DAY 10: May 31**

May 31st (M): Visit classes Tour of selected sites in Shanghai Overnight in school dorm

This fabulous trip comes to an end. We have a long day of travel ahead of us, and many memories to revisit as we go. We are all ready to return home to family and friends, but none of us will ever forget our Chinese adventures. Yesterday, Ms. Lee, Mr. Levinson, and I met up with the boys at the WeiYu school for a morning session there (Ms. McNeilly was not feeling well, but joined us later in the day at the Shanghai Museum). The boys will share their weekend experiences in their individual reports, I am sure, but all seemed to have had a terrific weekend. Almost all had visited the Shanghai World Expo over the weekend, and almost all had toured the Bund at some point as well. They also seem to have made excellent connections with their Chinese hosts. Yesterday's school day included a demanding Kung Fu session. The teacher tried her best to teach our students a rather complicated series of Kung Fu moves, with some remarkable success in some cases. A few students, as you can see in the photos, required frequent one-on-one attention. From Kung Fu, we moved as a group to sit in on a sophomore English class. One teacher, forty-eight students, focused attention throughout. The Thayer kids have been especially struck by the diligence and the attentiveness of the Chinese students, and those qualities were clearly on display in this class. We had a discussion session with Mr. Xu Yi, who has been so instrumental in arranging our visit to the WeiYu School; enjoyed lunch in the school cafeteria; and then took a trip into Shanghai to visit the Shanghai museum, which included wings dedicated to Chinese calligraphy, Chinese painting, jade, Chinese minority culture and clothing, and a visiting exhibit from Italy's Uffizi collection. As the boys returned to school for a goodbye celebration with their Chinese hosts, we teachers made a final visit to the Shanghai Exit and Entry Administration. After a wait of just less than an hour, we had secured what we needed: Mike's passport and visa! What a relief! Ms. Lee and Mr. Levinson returned to our hotel, having no interest in experiencing the mob scene that's been so frequently reported regarding the World Expo. Ms. McNeilly and I took our chances, hoping a Monday evening would mean less chaos than a weekend day visit might have entailed. We were gratified to find no lines to get tickets or to enter the Expo. We wandered the grounds as the sun set and the lights came up. We visited a few of the exhibit halls (including Spain, the home of the giant, lifelike, and very odd baby in the photos below) but concluded that the architecture of the exhibit halls and the mood of the crown were probably more interesting that the displays inside the halls. It made for a very pleasant ending to our fantastic tour of China.