So Xi'an has been the first stop on our short summer holiday in China, I'm still annoyed we couldn't stay longer or trsvel more but not a lot we can do about it! After catching a train from Pingxiang at 7am we stayed 1 night in Guangzhou before catching the 9ak bullet train to Xi'an. (If you ever go to Guangzhou, check out the 1920#s cafe near Haizhi Square, the German food and the service is excellent :D) That was a fun trip, dragging 5 suitacses between us wou...

A short story related to Dragon Boat Festival, curtesy of Anastasia: There is a very famous traditional Chinese story that has a close connection to the Dragon Boat Festival. Once upon a time on E-Mei mountain there lived two snake spirits, White Snake and Green Snake. These snakes, being magical, turned themselves into beautiful maidens and set off on a journey to the West Lake of Hang Zhou.When they arrived at West Lake they met a man named Xu Xian. White...

Zaoshang hao (Good morning)! So the past few days we had a short break from school for the Dragon boat festival (12th June) to commemorate the suicide and failed rescue attempt of the famous politician/ poet Qu Yuan. Besides eatting zongzi given to use by Anastasia(sticky rice with various types of fillings wrapped in a bamboo or banana leaf and steamed) we decided a trip to Guangzhou was in order. So after a 10 hour train journey (it was supposed to be 8 hours ...

Greetings followers :P So I just logged on to STA travels website to change our flight's home (we're aiming to fly between the 28th and 31st July depending on availability) and I discovered thatthe post I made about our winter travels appears to have disappeared! So once again here is our winter vacation: Well first we headed out to Nanchang for the magic pre-release, caught up with a few of our friends and did some of our last minute shopping for Harbin. Onc...

Hello all! Well Jon and I have now officially finished working for winter vacation. On 23rd December Jon and I went and helped out Simon and co at Pingxiang Oxford English School's concert. Besides rocking up 10am for a rehersal we weren't really needed to help out much so we generally sat around watching the rehersal and practicing our solo part of the performance, occasionally having the odd kid siddle up to us shyly and then run off when we started to look ...