Good classes again today - we are racing through the boring poetry stuff now so that we can get onto the Christmas activities. The giving of presents was again generally sucessful although I did have another student draw a pile of 'pooh'!! I had one yesterday, but he was a troublesome student - today it was Cameron who has been up until this point been one of my favourites - I even gave him a speacial name - I was quite upset and didn't know if I should be please...

An early start for our Mandarin lesson, where we spent more time gossiping with Miss Cao than learning the language. She told us that we would be having 3 days of for new year and 3 days off for exams, then went to check something with Mrs Lio and came back to tell us we could finish teaching on Friday!!! Hannah made lots of noises about wanting to teach on Christmas Day whilst I prodded her and tried to remind her that she would get to spend more time with her...

Had the teaching day from hell today. The culture corner pages which I have to teach were on 'Romanticism Poetry' and there is no way on earth of making the comparison between Wordsworth and Li Bai interesting to 17 year olds. On top of that it seems they liked the games last week and thought that's what we should do in every English lesson. I tried to drag them through it with promises of fun next week for Christmas but to no avail - they just talked through a...

Lesson planning this morning then popped to the shops to get some lunch as we were being picked up by Tony's mum at 1:00 to go to the Great Wall. We thought it was just Rick, Tony and their mum's, but when we got there we found they had also invited one of my students, her parents, Tony's grandmother and Rick's uncle and cousin so there was quite a big crowd of us. We drove to Mutianyu and were taken to a cave which we had completely missed on our previous trip...

A very lazy day and then went to the hotpot place for dinner tonight to try out some more options in preparation for Christmas Eve. Then came back and watched movies with a bottle of wine.