Back to school and I don't know what it is about my Monday classes - they are far worse than on any other day. Maybe it is just because it is my busiest day and therefore I get a bit less tolerant or maybe they are just difficult classes! Had to sort out the situation with the electricity bill today - the school thought we should be paying for it, but when they read the contract again they realised that actually they need to reimburse us. Hannah and I have dec...

Didn't get in until 6 this morning so spent the morning in bed catching up on sleep. This afternoon I went to the shops looking for envelopes which appear to be very difficult to get! Afterwards we went for dinner and then did some lesson planning. About 9pm all of our lights went out. This is happened a few times and normally we just have to flick the switch on the fuse box, but this time it just kept going off. We decided we would need to go and get help b...

Had my lessons with the Korean school this morning but the students were depressed and so it was impossible to get them to do anything. Basically many of the students parents had come to visit the school and taken their children out for the day - only the students whos parents hadn't come were actually in class and obviously they felt it was really unfair that they still had to do lessons. I raised this with the other teachers during the first break and was rel...

Hannah's lessons were cancelled today for exams and so we decided to go into Beijing for some sightseeing. Dressed in as many clothes as we could find (it's got very cold here now) we set off for the Temple of Heaven and were pleasantly surprised to find when we arrived that it was like a summers day and we had to remove many of our layers! We had expected to spend about a couple of hours here, but it was so lovely that we ended up wandering around for 4 hours....

Went to meet Miss Cao this morning who took us to administration to pick up our salaries from the Chinese school. Then she tried to sort out our pay from the Korean school - it all got very confusing due to the number of people involved in every transaction here! One of the 2nd Grade English teachers had given me the money in the staff room yesterday, but it was not what I expected. She kindly called the administration office (a different one than the one we w...