Another 11:15 start again this morning, but Hannah started at 10:20 and so I walked in with her. After morning lessons, we went to the supermarket and pulled together all the Mandarin we could to ask for pastries which did not contain meat or egg (Hannah is alergic). It took quite a time to get through to the counter staff (they kept pointing us to the meat counter) but eventually we came away with 2 pastries which we found were just what we were looking for! Thi...

My first lesson wasn't until 11:15 this morning but I wanted to catch up with the Senior Grade 2 Head of English, Mrs Liang (English name Sarah) today and so I went in at 9:00 hoping to catch her on a free period. Unfortunately she didn't have any but I arranged to meet her in the afternoon. Had my worst lesson yet this morning, as one of the Chinese teachers decided to sit in and couldn't understand why I wouldn't use her register. It took me a good 5 minutes to...

Had be at the school gates for 8:10 this morning so that we could attend the opening ceremony for the new term. Unfortunately no one came to meet us and therefore we missed the ceremony - it later transpired that we had been told the school gates but the person who was supposed to be meeting us was told the staff room!! After that we hung around until 10:20 when I had my first lesson. I was amazed to be greeted by a large cheer as I walked into the classroom - I'...

Another early start as Miss Cao came to pick us up to take us to the school for breakfast. When we got there loads of students were already there and it seems their task for the day was to clean up the school ready for term start tomorrow! Breakfast was not so good - an uncooked piece of dough filled with cabbage, a boiled egg and a bowl of soup! Luckily they left us to it and therefore didn't see how much we throw away! Afterwards we were given a tour of the sch...

6:00 start today so I had to get up at 5:00 to get ready and finish packing. We checked out of the hotel in groups according to our destination then our group got a minibus to the train station. We caught the 9:00 train from Harbin, dropped off some people in Shengyang, and then went onto Beijing. The trains were amazing - much better than I'd anticipated. We had really comfy seats, there was free hot and cold water, the cleaner came around every couple of hours ...