September 16th was an early morning for the sophomore class. Friends greeted each other with hugs and handshakes on the second floor of Hong Qiao Train Station, purple circles ringing their eyes and ice cold Starbucks clutched in their hands. Everyone had a story to tell. Roger Xu went to the wrong train station. Chloe Hui had just come from a sleepless night. The atmosphere was clearly tired, but palpably laced with apprehension and excitement as traffic jams and cold brew coffee marked the start of the week-long journey to Qiandao Lake, Hangzhou. The Ten was beginning.
Throughout the week, students were familiarized with the history and culture of the region through museum visits, horse-making activities, and lectures on water conservation. Education blended with bonding experiences. The Ten had various physical activities–from kayaking a whooping 9 miles on an open lake to hiking up a mountain and staring at the ground from the vantage of a vertigo-inducing glass bridge.
But if you were to ask a tenth grader, “What was the best part of your trip?”, you would be surprised to find that it was none of the above. Instead, they’d tell you that the hotel and the free time was what defined the trip. Unlike last year’s princess-themed rooms with the complimentary smoke-infused air, the class of 2022 had the privilege of staying at Hilton. Students were able to spend an hour of downtime each night enjoying the well-equipped gym, the lavish marble lobby with live music (sometimes performed by our very own tenth graders!) and a beautiful outdoor pool surrounded by coconut trees. The hotel was nothing short of an oasis, serenely harboring a hundred rowdy tenth graders that splashed and held chicken fights in the elegant infinity pool.
Similar to The Nine and The Eleven, yet different in terms of its goals, The Ten was designed to be an immersive and rewarding out-of-school experience to cultivate cultural awareness, peer interactions, and personal growth.
Whether or not the class of 2022 recognized these goals and values as much as the hotel is hard to say; however, The Ten was definitely all it set out to be.