We had a train to Beijing at 04:30 followed by a connecting train from there to Nanchang where we could make our way back to Yihuang. This meant leaving the hostel at 03:00 in the morning so we just decided not to sleep in a vain attempt to make our bodies want to sleep on the trains. We spent our final night drinking and chatting with our friends before we had to say goodbye - we won't see most of them until either final travelling in summer or Beijing just ...

After Christmas in Jiujiang we were pretty much straight back into things - we started teaching again on Boxing Day after our two days off. A few of the classes held 'parties' for us which basically consisted of moving all the desks to the walls to create a space in the middle where people of varying abilities would perform karaoke. Inevitably every invitation we received requested that we either bring Dan or Rob along with us as well as my guitar. They we...

December's been pretty eventful. It kicked off with returning from Jiujiang to have our Desk Officer visit a couple of days later. Our Desk Officer is the guy back on Coll who looks after us (or as I explained to my kids; my boss) and everyone has a Desk Officer visit at some point to check out how you're doing. At first we had Jonny to cover all of China but since we've been here David has taken over South of China so we were looking forward to meeting him ...

The couple of weeks in Yihuang before we went to Jiujiang weren't all that exciting but a couple of things happened I'll tell you about. Firstly, Beth and Cat came for another visit with their waiban Mrs Mung; the insanely annoying one. She took us all for a big meal with some of her classmates at 'Milo Coffee' just across the street from us. We'd been meaning to check out this coffee shop for a while but had never got round to it and it turns out the insi...

I'm up to date with all my blogs again (well, I was when I started to write this entry about two weeks ago…) so I thought I'd write another blog update with some thoughts on China. I'll try and answer some of the questions people have asked me in letters and emails and cover some of the generic stuff in China that people at home don't know about. I'll also include some stories from our China time so far that I've so far forgotten to include in other blogs...