The first day of 'Golden Week'. This is the name given to the week given off to celebrate the National Day of the People's Republic of China (Oct 1st). It's only officially 3 days off but generally people work one of the surrounding weekends in order to get a full 7 days off. Spent most of the day doing chores and preparing for my trip to Xi'an. Hannah went into school for her lesson, but they'd forgotten to tell her that all the lessons had been moved forward an...

Next Wednesday to Friday are public holidays here and therefore in order to get a week off, the school decided to do Mondays lessons today and Tuedays lessons tomorrow so that we could then have Monday to Sunday off! However, I then got in today to be told the students were having Army training next week and therefore we weren't going to do lessons tomorrow. It seems a little bit unfair to me that the children lose their holiday at such short notice, but that s...

Meet Miss Cao at school first thing this morning and she took me to the dentist which is actually only about 5 minutes from our apartment. You can't book an appointment here, you just have to queue, so when we arrived we were told we would probably have to wait about an hour or two! I was encouraged to see that all the dentists were wearing 'dentist like' clothes and everything looked very clean. What wasn't so great was the fact that the dental work took plac...

Went into work early as I needed to see Miss Cao. I broke a tooth last night and I needed to arrange to see a dentist. Miss Cao said there were 2 options - 1) I could go to the hospital and wait in a long queue, or 2) go to a private dentist. I said I would take whichever option was quickest and would be most sympathetic to an absolutely terrified patient! She decided private! Anyway, it seems you still have to go and queue and the next time both her and I b...

Meet Charlie at school at 7:50 and we walked to the train station to try and buy my tickets for Xi'an. We arrived at 8:20, and despite all the signs saying that the ticket office opened at 8:00, it clearly wasn't. Charlie asked some of the station staff why, but no one had any idea! He suggested we get the bus to a travel agent he knew which aold train tickets so we did. It was crazy there - no one stood in a queue and you just had to push forward and ask questio...