That 32-hour train journey I mentioned? Much better than expected, even without much sleep. The other Jiangxi volunteers were on the same train as us again, and after Dan came to find us in the morning (I was dozing with my eye-mask on and nearly had a heart attack when he woke me with a kiss on the cheek) we spent the majority of the journey with them. Some pushy Chinese parents shoved their four-year-old at us to practice his English at one point, so we sat and...

Tomorrow night Nicole and I will be embarking on our 32-hour train journey to Lanzhou, in Gansu province, where all of the Project Trust China volunteers will be converging for a much-need language course. Immediately after this, we will all head to nearby (relatively speaking) Xi'an together for a few days of sightseeing and the such-like, so altogether we'll have about two weeks holiday. Booking train tickets and hostels for this trip has been manic - even now,...

Until this weekend, mine and Nicole's shopping has been mostly limited to the big supermarkets near us. For the most part, these are quite like their English counterparts. You have to stow anything you might later be accused of having stolen in a small locker before you go in, and they have ramp-like escalators that you can take trolleys up, but aside from that they're pretty standard. Apart from the food, obviously - you don't get tanks of live fish, tortoises a...

I've been dreading teaching my Senior 1 classes since we were first given our timetables: whilst we were originally told they were the equivalent of Year 10, we later learnt that, as Chinese students start secondary school a year later than their English counterparts, they're more like Year 11. Which means they're only 2 years younger than us! Luckily, the novelty of being a foreigner continues to serve me well, and the three classes I've taught so far have been ...

Today was the 28th annual National Teachers Day in China - as we were told at 9 this morning, in the same phone call that explained we would be teaching Tuesday's lessons instead of Mondays and the last two periods of the day were cancelled, because we would be at a meeting with all the other teachers in the school and taking part in an important ceremony. No complaints from me, because this meant I only had to teach one lesson, and I got to avoid the Senior clas...