HARBIN, Heilongjiang Province: This made me chuckle: all the English people have been put into the beginner grammar class, whereas as all the Europeans who speak English as a second language are in the advanced class! I guess if you can just speak English, you don't really need to know the rules behind how the language works... It was a really interesting lesson, although I did struggle a bit to keep up! In the afternoon we had another culture class - this ...

HARBIN, Heilongjiang Province: We did some storytelling in our lessons today. Was fun! More TP prep as well - my first class will be split with Marte, so we've been working together on a lesson plan. We've got to teach about 'families', but it's so difficult because we don't know anything about our students' abilities or anything! So our lesson could be too easy or too difficult - either one is not great! Getting on really well with my room-mate at the momen...

HARBIN, Heilongjiang University: Mooore lessons. The lessons are interesting though, mainly! We started preparations for TP week today (Teaching Practise). We've been split into groups of 5 - I've been put with the two James', Marte and Sarah Rawle. Really chuffed actually, it's a really great group. As a group we'll have two lessons a day, so each person will be teaching 20-30 minutes. It's a bit scary, but apparently we're going to have fairly small cla...

HARBIN, Heilongjiang Province: More lessons! We had our first cultural class in the afternoon - learning how to make Chinese Knots. It was unbelievably hard! I couldn't even manage the first knot

HARBIN, Heilongjiang Province: More lessons today - had our first lesson on how to write lesson plans - I think that's going to be really helpful.