15th November 2008 We had been asked by the hostel in Wuhan if we would accompany some government official so he could practice his English and he'd show us around the city. We agreed and planned to leave at 12noon so got up a bit earlier to pick up our return train tickets before we had to meet them. At 8:45am we were told they were coming at 9am! Werushed around and were ready kind of by 9:30am, and the hostel had told them we would need to get our train...

I realise I've been pretty bad at keeping my blog up to date, so, again, I'm going to try and catch it up! 25th October 2008 Beginning where I left off, I went to have my Hepatitis B injection at the doctors on that Saturday evening. It was cold that night and it had rained all weekend. Lisa was going to help me to buy at bike but since it was raining so much, we decided to postpone it. The doctors on campus is funny, there's a turtle in a dish bowl that looks ...

Ok so I have a lot of blog to catch up. This will just be to quickly connect Zhangjiajie to now, so I can get on with it as normal. We were without the internet for a few days after we returned from Zhangjiajie, which was annoying. Apparently the whole campus was down, but after about 3 days we found out that it had only lasted a day and they'd just forgotten to switch us back on… At the beginning of that week I did some exploring when I did not have classes ...

WED 1 OCT The next morning we had a taxi ready to pick us up at 4:30am! In hindsight that was much too early and we spent over an hour at the train station, but now we know for next time. Our train arrived a little bit early and we managed to find somewhere to perch for our 4hr15 train journey. After the first hour-ish we reached Chengde and the train emptied, so we were able to find a seat. We were all pretty tired and had a bit of a nap which made the rest of...

The Chinese holidays work in a very strange way. This week was national week, and an official holiday ran from Wed Oct 1st - Fri Oct 3rd. To make it so people get a full seven days off work, most places moved Monday and Tuesday's working days to the Saturday and Sunday at the beginning of the week. For this reason, I had class bright and early at 8am on Saturday. It was my lovely Chinese class so it wasn't too bad, and by 9:40am I had finished for the week! I th...