Firstly I wish to apologise for my lack of activity on the blog front...you know you haven't been on here for a while when you have to flick through all your emails to find your username and password! I could give you a list of lame excuses as to why I haven't been updating you all on my new and exciting life out here in Beijing but it will surely only bore you. Right what have I been up to?

Work, work, work.... it seems to massively comsume my life! That is why you are there Tara, I hear some of you cry, this is true I know! However this much work is not what I expected, at all. Weekdays are full to the brime of vocab, grammar and homework. Friday evening has become that time in the week when we all let of maybe too much steam and drink maybe too much uber cheap (30 pence) beer, this then has a knock on effect for the whole weekend...it was only the other week when I remarked that that was the first time I had seen a saturday morning since our arrival - shocking behaviour! Saturday afternoon is very much a lying around the flat down, attempting to make some kind of food out of all the odd chinese bits and bobs we find in the fridge (often eggs and aubergine). If I am really feeling that lazy I will dial up my favourite contact - McDonalds Delivery and order myself in the classic Big Mac Menu - extra large of course with an Oreo McFlurry (they seriously lack on the toppings out here - what I would give for a smarties McFlurry!). Sunday morning is taken up by tutoring, something I initially resented but am now very much enjoying. I am teaching a 7 year old called Lilly, who is absolutely adorable, she started off being rather shy but after having made a fool of myself a few times trying to make animal noises she soon become a bit more giggly! Her parents are also lovely, and took me out for lunch the other day. On top of this, they pay me 200Yuan (£20) for one hour! It does seem to disappear pretty quick though....

So that is the weekend gone.

Back to the routine of lessons and so on. BUT. A while back now, in fact must have been around 2 months ago, we had an unexpected weeks worth of holiday! It was national week in China, a period of time where every single chinese person seems to flock to the major cities - perfect time to get out of Beijing? Hell yes! We did a couple of pretty cool activites during the week, but the highlight for sure was camping out on the Great Wall - I am still, after 2 months, finding it hard to express how incredible the whole experience was, I will however try my hardest to give you a brief insight into my best chinese moment yet.

The Great Wall. wow.

There you have it! :) Nahhh only joking! Ok so the team; Freddy, Gideon, Emily, Lucy and myself, had a vague plan of which part of the wall we wanted to go, we wanted to head to the closest/remotest part of the wall - I realise that that maybe doesn't make sense, but we didn't want to go to the touristy area so instead decided to go to a rundown part of the wall. By this I mean by 3.30pm we were ready to leave the flat - bear in mind it takes 20 minutes to walk to the tube, another 15 minutes on the tube followed by an hour and a half bus ride, followed by a 20 minute taxi ride. So we were at the starting point by 6pm, what we had no pre-empted was the information the taxi driver told us - it is a good 2 hour hike (more like climb) up to the wall from the starting point.....ah. So it was 6pm, we were equiped with 2 small rucksacks full of beer, zhaozi and baozi (the latter two being delicious snacks when hot, not so much after many hours of travelling), we were holding our sleeping bags, thankfully there was enough room for the tent in a rucksack, and the sun was setting - great! The number of times I said 'If Dad could see me now, he would be ashamed' was slightly too many. We started the walk - within half an hour it was pitch black, and we were scrambling over boulders and tree roots, it was pretty steep and at one point towards the end we had to clamber up a very dodgy looking wooden ladder - eeek! However spirits were surprisingly high, it must have been due to my awesome suggestion of playing the 'I went shopping and I bought an....' game, a game that i remember playing often on walks when I was A LOT younger!

WE MADE IT! Awesome sense of achievement, and before long we had made camp on our very own part of the wall. It must have been where one of the towers once stood but now it was a perfectly flat area right in between 2 small peaks. Beer bottles were opened, snacks were scoffed and stories and jokes were shared, it was a perfect evening. We watched as the stars became more and more prominent and the moon began to make its way across the sky, the cold did begin to set in a tad but not nearly as bad as I thought it would do. Classicly, I did end up moving into the tent to get out of the slight wind whilst the others braved the outdoors. We got a couple hours of sleep before the sun began to rise - I think I will struggle to get across the impressivness of this. Having arrived in the pitch blackness we had no idea what our surroundings looked like, and so with every second the sun rose we could see more and more. I felt like I was on top of the world, looking out in front of us the morning mist made the scenery so wild and mysterious, behind us we could see the wall stretch on for miles and miles, winding its way along the ridge line. Of course I went absolutely mental with picture taking, but I don't think even they capture the try beauty. As the sun rose higher in the sky more and more people were making their way up to our prime campsite, we took a couple more photos, went exploring along the wall a little way but then headed back down as the snacks couldn't really sustain us for that much longer.

To sum up the experience - mind blowingly amazing! Something everyone should experience, if you come out this year, have no fear I will drop any plan and take you there! Might wait until the summer though - Beijing winter is bitter cold!

Right well there you have it, the tale of the Great Wall! The first of many tales I hope to share with you guys, but for now that is all.