The best experience of my life!

I have recently returned home from spending a month in China (I did two Rustic programs back-to-back), and I can safely say that it was the best experience of my life! For the first two weeks, I was on the Silk Road Service program, and I cannot recommend it enough, especially for those who love adventure, or want to get out of their comfort zones! We spent those two weeks traveling around the Yunnan province, learning about China's diverse cultures, and getting to experience a lot of them! From hiking up to Mapingguan (a very remote city) with my group to all of us hanging out on rooftops wherever the trip took us for that night, I will never forget the memories I made on this trip or the people on it! People I met at the airport only two weeks before soon became family, and I now have an incredible amount of love for Yunnan, and all of the people who got to see it with me! After a tear-filled goodbye at the airport, I knew that I had one day of rest, and after that was a completely new adventure. This second adventure was the Panda Conservation and Wild China trip, a completely different look at the country that I had now begun to call home. The panda trip is another that I can't recommend enough, although for other reasons. While there is still some adventure, this trip is a lot more laid back than the Silk Road one. We usually stayed in one place for a while and were not on the move as much as we were on the first trip. This was nice in some aspects, but we got to see a lot less of the Sichuan province than I had hoped. With that being said, the highlight of that trip was obviously the pandas, but also we took a bus ride to stay in a Tibetan Sichuanese village. The immersion of Tibetan culture for those few days made the bus ride 100% worth it! Since I have prior knowledge of the Chinese language, I found myself communicating with the locals, and understanding more about their culture. All in all, I can say without a single doubt, that both of these trips are incredible, and provided me with the best month of my life!