We have now reached Louguantai, the village where I will be teaching, but first a little bit about yesterday. We finsihed the weekend with some more tourism, this time braving the crammed local buses to see some of the city's best tourism spots. First, Ruth and I went to the Shaanxi Museum which featured some impressive-looking and very ancient artefacts, including a few members of the Terracotta Army, which hopefully I will be able to see in full at some point.

Next we headed to the Great Wild Goose Pagoda, an ancient Buddhist Temple to the south of the city. This was such a tourist spot, surrounded by a plethora of fun stalls, bouncy castles and more. They wouldn't let me in one of the kiddie pedalos so instead I opted for one of the fun activities available to adults - being photographed in the scenic surroundings wearing some traditional Chinese clothes! Photos to follow if I can figure out how to work this computer.

Outside the temple was the best fountain show I have ever seen, stretching really far and totally surrounded by excited Chinese tourists, with very dramatic accompanying music (again, there's a video but this computer is all in Chinese which makes it difficult to use anything which isn't the internet). We toured the beautiful gardens surrounding the Pagoda temple, before climbing it. It was higher than it looked, especially for a lazy person like me, but the views from the top made it worthwhile.

This morning, we took the long drive to the village of Louguantai. We're staying in the panda conservation park, our rooms neighbouring the rowdy pandas (apparently there's one which keeps climbing up the building and pulling the air-con pipe out, which is fine by me as long as he doesn't sneak through my window at night). The school I'm teaching at is about twenty minutes' walk away and Mr Deng's restaurant, where we take our meals, is halfway between the two. We had two delicious meals there today, though I'm definitely tiring of Chinese cuisine and should probably cut back on the number of Oreos I'm eating to give me a taste of Western culture!

We taught our first lessons at the school this afternoon. I have been allocated Grade 4 which is 9 and 10 year olds. Their teacher is Mr Juan (or at least that's what it sounds like) but unfortunately neither he nor any of the other English teachers can actually speak very good English. We were given the textbook that the class uses which we must also use for our teaching. Mr Juan first tried to get me to sing an English song which I'd never heard of (I think it was made up by the textbook, but the school doesn't seem to have tapes or a tape player) but eventually we settled on a chant which went "One, two, three, four, Wendy's at the classroom door, five, six, seven, eight, Eating dinner of the plate". I'm not convinced the children had any idea what that meant, despite my amazing hand actions, but they seemed perfectly happy to shout it back at me. The children are brilliant - hugely enthusiastic and absolutely thrilled to see a white person! They were all very keen to hug and high five us and when I got my camera out they went absolutely wild!

The village is very quiet and since we have dinner at 5pm, the evenings are long and quite difficult to fill, so expect to hear a lot from me if I have anything to report and do email me to give me something to do please! Tonight we tried to pass the time by trying some 52% miscellaneous Chinese alcohol but it was too disgusting to drink, and the board games which came free at McDonalds wore thin after a while as well. Still, there is a festival happening this week to celebrate one of the founders of Taoism, Laozi, which might bring some life to the village! Speak to you all soon, thanks for reading and sorry if you keep getting emails about my updates - do let me know if you want to be taken off my contacts list.