The purpose of this phenomenological case study was to examine music education majors' lived experience of negotiating cultural differences in an international choral trip from the US to China. Eight music education majors from a music college in the eastern U.S. participated in this study. I collected three types of data describing their cultural exchange experience: participants' daily journals, and the research assistant's observation notes during the trip, and a series of focus group interviews after the trip. Through the process of epoché, phenomenological reduction, horizontalization, and structural synthesis, four themes emerged: (a) Explicit knowledge acceptance by superficial cultural engagement, (b) Elatedness over common musical characteristics, (c) Implicit othering attitude, and (d) Moments of self-reflexivity. In the essence of their cultural interactions, participants experienced dialectic tension between musical similarities and differences, surficial and deep cultural engagement, universal and non-universal consideration, and their centrality toward self and others.