Back to school today and started advertising English Corner to my students - I even managed to get a round of applause from my students (in 2 classes) when I wrote Chinese characters for the place we would be meeting on the board - they seemed to be well impressed!. The Grade 2 students (my year) get a free period on a Thursday afternoon and so the teachers thought this would be a good time to do it although when I told them later that I was starting this week, ...

Every so often it feels like time is running away and that I need to make sure I have seen everything, so I got up this morning and decided to get the bus into Beijing. Once there I headed for Jing Shan Park, and found myself walking past the National Theatre and Bei Hai Park on route. Jing Shan Park was lovely but I wish the day was clearer. There were 5 pavilions spread over a hill, which afford the most amazing views of the Forbidden City (which it used to...

Woke up feeling much better today and made up for being out of action for the last few days! Spent the morning on my lesson plan and then went to meet Hannah for lunch so we could go exploring!! We had heard a couple of times of a shopping arcade called 'Da Shi jie' meaning big world, but had not managed to find out where it was. We had read / been told that it was 6 stories tall and had restaurants, a gym and parties held at the top, however, because we had not ...

Thankfully I have Fridays off and so could stay at home and feel sorry for myself! Spent the day making maps and props for our lesson this evening with Rick and Tony. We were using the theme of 'Travel' and so we started off with transport and directions, and then moved onto places. We told them all about where we came from and then asked them to write a travel brochure about Huairou. They said Huairou is boring and there is nothing to do here - so it seems i...

Felt really rough this morning but dragged myself into work. The trouble with feeling ill when you're teaching is that you still have to stand up in front of 50 kids and be enthusiastic about what you're doing - at least when I had an office job, I could just hide away in a corner and ignore everyone else!! Plus work colleagues tend to have a bit more sympathy - the kids just use it as an excuse to push things just that little bit further! It seemed like a lon...