Spent the day sorting out the apartment and getting rid of rubbish ready for our impending departure. Hannah helped me be particuarly ruthless with my clothes so it looks like I willbe wearing the same 2 outfits for the next 3 months!!! Went to Big Pizza for one final time tonight.

Spent most of the day researching my travels - trying to work out how long I can have in each place in order to get to somewhere where I can then get a flight to India. Also had a conversation with Miss Cao about our completion bonus. We are supposed to get this with our final pay, but the school are saying they don't know anything about it! Decided there was no point in getting annoyed with her (she is just a go between) so had to email the TTC office to ask ...

Spent the morning sorting out photo's, blog and emails, then trying to work out how I can fit in getting my jabs and visa's before I get to each country I visit. Was hoping to get my visa's sorted before I leave Beijing but the Indian one takes 6 working days so rather than hang around here for that long I think I'll just schedule in a slightly longer stop in Hanoi and get it there. This afternoon we worked on a final lesson for the boys and then popped into s...

Got up early and checked out of the hotel, then got a taxi to the station. Harbin really does have the worst driving I have ever seen and due to people not thinking most of the roads were gridlocked. Luckily we had allowed plenty of time and so we still got to the station with some time to spare. The train home was not so amazing as the one on the way but it was perfectly adequate. Arrived in Beijing at 5 and had a Subway sandwich before going on to Huairou.

A combination of a horrible cold I seem to have caught, and the fact that we managed to get around all the parks we had come to see yesterday, made us decide to have a lazy day around the hotel today. That way we could stay out of the cold and enjoy the luxury of the hotel - the likes of which neither of us have seen since we arrived!! Went for lunch with Kirsty and Pete as they were leaving this afternoon and then lost the afternoon watching Chinese programmes...