It was 2007 and I really did not understand how our parents could let us to go abroad. I was studying in Wuhan, and to get there, firstly, we had to fly 8 hours to Beijing, and then buy tickets to Wuhan by ourselves in the airport.
In 2007 it was not possible to buy tickets online to one of the Chinese cities outside of the country, you could do it only inside China. So, our parents sent their 19 years old children just with one ticket to Beijing, and then we had to figure it out by ourselves.
There was no WhatsApp or Viber, we could just make a brief call to our parents, and then survived as we could. The best advantage of this trip was total ruining of the language barrier, because you needed to speak Chinese everywhere. At that time nobody speaks English in China and even in Beijing airport, so we could use only Chinese, and we had to get used to it very fast.
Everything was surprising for us. The previous generations did not have a possibility to study abroad, and in a reality, we saw different China, not the one that we were told at the university.