LoPair Review

Self-Intro
Hi, I'm a 4th-year university student, male, 20 years old and Asian Canadian (my parents are from Central Asia). I found out about this program through a library recruitment I came across which mentioned a cultural exchange program in Shanghai during the summer. I had a free month in summer I felt like it could be a fun experience (spoiler: I was right!!).
Pre-trip
So before the trip, I registered online gave them my general information and a Canadian company called Scotia-personnel helped me organize my documents and set up the trip for me (they were really nice and helpful btw). I made a profile which included my resume, letter to the family and some references. After a while a family contacted me and we had a video interview. After that, I completed the confirmation documents and the trip was booked for 6 weeks. I actually ran into some problems with a test I was writing that summer (it had to be moved later) and the test ended up being in the first week that the trip was scheduled. The family and LoPair were really helpful and wanted to accommodate me anyway!! So, in the end, I ended up going for a total of 5 weeks to Shanghai to live with my host family.
Trip itself
So the family was kind and wanted to pick me up from the airport, LoPair arranged my flight tickets and gave them all the information they needed. I lived in Pudong area during my trip which was conveniently close to the downtown area where my language classes were. The classes were every Monday and Wednesday from 10-12:15 and were mandatory time off from the family. The host kid I was matched with was 11 years old and spoke basic English and was enough for us to communicate at a basic level, as time went on his English skills and our overall communication skills improved greatly. I had time off every Friday night and all Saturday, which was great since I had time to go out and see the city with my friends :D. I met some great friends in the language classes and outside of class, the only difficulty was that we didn't all have our free time off at the same time. The family was kind and got my train tickets to go see other cities nearby on my days off if I asked them, sometimes we would go out together as a family for dinner and see city landmarks. For my orientation which took place in Hangzhou, I had tickets provided for me and my whole trip planned and paid for me. During the orientation we went to see the famous West Lake and the pagoda located there, then we went to a shopping district and finally for a Chinese dinner! We all stayed in a small hotel (which was really clean and nice) after one of the coordinators (Saigon) was amazing and took me to see the city on her free time because I had some free time after the orientation was over. During the work days, I had a plan outlined by my host mom for each day which was really helpful because it gave me an estimate of how much work and how much play time I needed to spend with the host kid. Overall my host kid was very funny and kind but like any kid, he could get annoying. We would spend time together from breakfast to dinner, playing games, reading books, studying, eating, drawing, talking all the time about random things. It was really fun but it did get really tiring after 4-5 days, which meant that days off were really nice to spend outside the house. Since in the summer it gets really hot, many of the days were spent inside, that means that having good books and fun hands-on things to do is a must. I got to see the best parts of Shanghai, either with my friends or with my host family. Living in a family with a different culture is challenging but its a great and fun experience and taught me about our similarities and differences. I will keep in touch with my host family and this is a relationship I have for life.