The initial excitment of teaching is wearing off already!!! I can't believe that I thought Chinese children would be well disciplined -by 17 they certainly aren't! I actually had students asleep in their desks today - I hasten to add that they were already asleep when I walked into the class so it wasn't my lesson that caused them to be in that state! In fairness to them, I'm hardly surprised - the poor things start school at 7 in the morning so by the 5:30 lesso...

Woke up early and made our way back to Huairou in the rain! It doesn't rain here much so when it does you're never prepared. Got back and watched some movies and did our lesson plans all afternoon. We decided this evening to have street food for our dinner, so we found somewhere which looked okay, and pointed at the food we could eat - mainly bar-b-qued vegetables and bread - which we had with a beer.

Got up late and made our way into Beijing centre to meet up with the other guys from our training who are based in Beijing. We got a taxi to the local bus station to buy our travel card and put some credit on it, and then got the bus to Dongzhimen. We arrived at about 2:30 and had 4 and a half hours to kill before meeting everyone and so we decided to go to Lama Temple which looked close on the map! It wasn't quite as close as it looked and so we arrived at 3:45 ...

The start of the weekend!!! Actually, it's not really, but I don't have any lessons on a Friday and so I don't need to go in. So this morning I decided to go and sort out a Chinese sim card for my phone. I started off in the market thinking this would be cheaper, but after much gesturing, pointing and attempted speaking of Mandarin, I decided that a department store may have someone who could met me half way on the language barrier. This worked to a certain exten...

Only 3 classes today so I went in about 10:30 for the first one. Supermarket again at lunchtime but we decided to save time and grabbed one of my students who happened to walk past and say hello, so that he could translate for us! We found out this afternoon that our apartment is just being cleaned and should be ready in the next day or two. Fingers crossed - it would be nice to move in and unpack properly. Some of the guys we were in Harbin with are meeting in B...