A non eventful day. Lessons went well and at lunchtime we went to look around the indoor market looking for things we want to buy once we get paid tomorrow. This evening we went for dinner at 'Woman Love'. There are 3 things I don't think I will ever get used to in China. Firstly, the way they slurp their food. Secondly, the way the Chinese just spit in the streets - the build up to it is particuarly bad, and thirdly the fact that toddlers had a split down t...

Re-worked my lesson plan for the 6th time today and it finally seemed to work! The good thing about teaching the same lesson 14 times a week is that you get plenty of opportunities to make it work, even if it does get a bit boring by the end of the week! We are supposed to be getting paid on Friday so we have been trying to find out if we need to open a bank account, but no one seems to know! Decided we would open one anyway, but need to wait until someone can...

Back to school today and I was scheduled to do my monthly 'culture corner'. This is a section in their text books which discusses more worldly topics and the one for this month was the Job Market. It was a disaster - the students knew none of the vocabulary and despite me trying 5 different ways of teaching it with each of my classes, I think I left them all having failed to teach anything!! This is going to be a painful week!! The afternoon lessons have all ...

Arrived back in Beijing at 9:00 this morning, 2 hours ahead of schedule, which was a nice surprise. The journey wasn't too bad - I managed to doze a bit but didn't get any proper sleep so I was still quite tired. Got a taxi to the subway, the underground to the bus station and then the bus back to Hairou - so I got home about 11:30. Caought up with Hannah on what we'd both been doing over the past week, then we went for a late lunch at our new Favourite Chines...

Had a lie in this morning to make the most of our luxury hotel, then got a taxi and went to the Great Goose Pagoda. It was in a bit of a tacky touristy area which put me off before I even got inside, but once inside it didn't have much to offer. We spent some time looking around the Ci'en Temple which is attached and then climbed the Pagoda. From here we went to the Shaanxi History Museum which was just around the corner. Queued for about and hour and a half ...