'Summer is a child - ready to cry at anytime' - Judy Zhu (Our Wayban)

Sunday morning, 6am start for tai chi. To say the least we sucked. Only stayed for a bit as everyone already knew the moves and they were ridiculousy flexible!!! Catherine and I just giggled and attempted the moves, to the best we could anyway. Later that day we then went to play ping pong and basketball with some students. Firstly i want to set something straight.. Chinese children are not as good as you all think they are, they're good, just not AMAZING! Basketball, well i just stood there playing the whole 'girl who doesnt do sports' act.

Later that night we headed to town to get some dinner, probably got around 3 minutes from the school until we heard one teacher shouting 'Bess, Cat'.. then grabbing us by our arm she decided on nothing but to take us out for dinner and later insisting that she ordered extra dumplings just for us to take home, all paid for .. BABE!. Later that day we were then disturbed by a knock on our door around 10 at night. Turns out it was the girl we had earlier played table tennis with, saying she had presents for us.

OMG .. she brought us a union jack notebook each saying that it will help our homesickness and a justin bieber poster (made the mistake of saying we liked him to not upset her). To top it all of, she wrote us a letter saying how she wants to take us shopping and be our friend and (prepare your tissues) she see's us as her sisters :D.. AWHHHHHHHHH

Yesterday, we started our teaching. My first lesson went well but the children arent as behaved as they are made out to be, they talk like there is no tomorrow! I have to say having 60 children in a class is still a handful, but my 2nd and 3rd class went much better and i no longer felt as nervous. We also found out that we each have our own desk in the English office which i used for one of my free period. I soon realised that its impossible to get any work done with the amount of english teachers asking me questions and wanting to look at the photos that i had. In the evening we decided me missed English food too much so treated ourself to the local take out :P Got some nuggets and chips, which, werent as good as McDonalds but they did the trick!

Catherine has then developed a sore throat in which she can hardly speak and has, what i call, a walrus cough. It was questionable whether she would teach today or not as she can hardly whisper, let alone shout to class of 60

Today (Tuesday 4th) - I woke up to Catherine whispering at me that she was going to call our waiban to tell them that she could not work today because of her cough. I then checked my texts later to find she had been taken to the HOSPITAL and now the doctors.. turns out the Chinese see a bad throat as a much more serious thing than us Brits do. I quickly got changed and went to visit her where i witnessed her being placed on a drip.. a drip for a sore throat .. they sure do look after us here. I then headed to my lessons and met Catherine later where she still seemed as bad as before, maybe even worse but she just went home to rest.

The rest didnt last long! We discovered that after the water leaked through Catherines room a bit it caused all the electricity in her side of the house to fail, including the kitchen. This would explain my picture of carrying a microwave to my study, just so i could heat up some dumplings for my lunch. Luckily, our school is God damn amazing and they managed to fix it within about 5 minutes :D

I then returned back to my classes to teach my last 3 lessons, all in a row. I was knackered and fed up of holding my fingers to my lips and telling my students to hush. It seems putting your hand up does not exist in China. In one class i had one cheeky sod who decided it would be funny to imitate what i was doing. He learnt the hard way and spent a few minutes at the front, facing the wall.. its easy to say that he learnt his lesson and soon apologised to me (cruel teacher i know). Other than that my students have been lovely and were more than happy to pose for a picture for me (see my albums).

In the afternoon i headed to town alone to get us some dinner as i thought it best for Catherine to rest. When you are a westerner walking alone in the middle of China you get A LOT more looks! I got people pointing, shouting hello and a man even stopped me so he could have a photograph. I strolled around listening to my ipod and it was probably the happiest i have been in a while. I am really enjoying myself here and just being alone and taking it all in was not scary or nerve wracking but exciting and the scenery i saw was amazing! I then cooked us some bangers and mash, we really fancied ANOTHER english meal which i think actually turned out quite well.

More teaching to come tomorrow and Thursday we are starting to teach the juniours, another fun adventure im sure.

Catch up soon!

<3