Sophia, one of the Penn Global Seminar Correspondents, shares her experience abroad during the Spring 2025 semester. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed.
Bus rides
The first drive from the airport into Blantyre can only be described as lush. We scramble to open all the windows on the bus until a warm breeze fans against our cheeks like an exhale. For the next thirty minutes, everyone is in a trance – no phones, no earbuds, just rows of students silently craning their necks toward the windows, trying to drink in every inch of a world that was utterly new.
The sun is buttery and the fields are marzipan green and the road stains wheels the color of copper. We see women balancing wide jugs on their heads with grace. We pass shacks with pleated iron roofs and brightly painted signs announcing local shops. Out of nowhere, a BreadTalk pops up, which snaps me straight back to my grandmother’s local mall in Shenzhen.
Over the course of the week, our bus rides became a kind of quiet solace. They were brief windows of stillness as the rest of the trip moved in fast-forward. Looking outside, our rides felt like hazy scenes in a traveling play. Sometimes we drove through the countryside, with maize fields stretching into the horizon. The rolling hills surprised me – I hadn’t realized
Malawi was so mountainous, or so green.Our guide told us that the rows upon rows of maize we saw were all planted by hand. Other times, we rolled through bustling marketplaces dotted with vendors and bikes. We saw live chickens on sale for 8500 kwacha. When we passed through Zomba, Stephanie bought soursop from a fruit vendor through the open bus window. Looking back, the brief exchange over the moving glass felt strangely cinematic.
We did a lot of waving on those rides. As a bus full of Americans, we got stares wherever we went. The children always waved first. Their joy felt immediate and contagious. What struck me most was how young the country felt. Villages teemed with children, and the streets were full of fresh faces and strong, solid lines. It was a vivid contrast to my home city of Hong Kong, where the aging population looms heavy, and even to cities in the U.S. Here, the future felt right in front of us: beaming, barefoot, running beside our bus.
This story is by Sophia Zhang. Read more at PennAbroad
Posted: April 24, 2025
