I know everyone mentions how ~gorgeous~ Vermont is in their posts, but I felt those sentiments pretty strongly yesterday. I went on two different hikes: one in Ripton in the afternoon, and then a classic sunset hike on Snake Mountain at night. Before I visited Middlebury for the first time, I had spent a long weekend in Ripton on the Bread Loaf Campus. Ever since then I have described Bread Loaf as my favorite place on Earth, which rings fairly true to this day. This week, my Chinese professor invited his students who are on campus for the summer to visit his house, so four of us did just that yesterday afternoon. The catch was that we could only speak Chinese, which felt to me a little bit like seeing the world through the eyes of a kid. As the four of us walked around in awe, we began trying to name animals and fruits in the best Chinese we could come up with (that’s a lot of new vocabulary). Lucky for us, Mu Laoshi was prepared, and printed sheets with animals, tree species, bugs, and other hiking vocab in Chinese that we could utilize on our walk. His house was gorgeous, and had a huge flower garden occupied by many hummingbirds, grape vines, and blueberry bushes. His wife is a painter and showed us her art studio in a barn adjacent to the house too. After our brief tour of the place, we went to a cross-country skiing trail head, the trail itself being overgrown with plants and obstructed by felled trees. (It was awesome.) The best part, though, was arriving at an opening in the middle of the woods, where Mu told us there used to be water five years prior. As we continued walking, we stopped every now and again when he would point out the names of wild plants and flowers; his knowledge of them is really impressive. As I climbed a small, grass-covered hill, I realized what I was actually standing on was a beaver dam. We could see where the water had been relocated, and I saw some of the largest beaver dams I had ever seen. While absolutely gorgeous, it was interesting how quiet and devoid of animals the space was. Not a single beaver was spotted. We did, however, meet salamanders, a toad, a blue jay, and giant artist’s fungus. When we got back, we ate blueberries off the bush and drank Chinese tea. Being around so many of my classmates who are in the Chinese Summer Language Schools this year certainly makes me very hopeful and excited for next year, when hopefully I’ll be doing the same!