你好， Today is my 18th birthday!! Can't believe how fast this year has gone, I definitely don't feel 18! Had a lovely start to the day with a Skype call from my family and I opened the two parcels they had sent me which included thermals and socks, cadbury's chocolate freddos, a chocolate cake and birthday cards :) Lucie had also made me card and gotten me a Jade Buddha necklace, which is absolutely lovely. A normal day of teaching today, first class at 10...

你好， Today has been a very interesting day. We were met by our calligraphy teacher, Ben, and his Sunday English Club pupils, and their parents at 7am. First they took us for a breakfast of noodles, dumplings and mushrooms (now I would normally class that as a lunch but... this is China...). We then got into one of the parent's car's and they took us to a temple in the mountains about half an hour outside of Yihuang (Ivy later informed me she was born there...

你好， First off, let me explain the picture attached to today's blog. In Yihuang, there is a lot of development and building sites. Just along the road from where we live are two sites. Now, a couple of weeks past on a Friday, we cycled past this junction and the building on the right looked exactly like the building on the left, and then on the Saturday when we headed to the supermarket, the entire building had been done up to look like how it does in the p...

你好， I got post! Parcels have arrived for my birthday, but I can't open them until Monday :( However, I also got post that I could open - Lucie and I did some winter shopping on taobao.com, a Chinese shopping site with amazing cheap prices, which are even cheaper on 11th Nov. (This is 11/11, and as the number 1 represents a single person (in China) then this day is Single's Day, and they Chinese think if you are single you are unhappy so you buy stuff to ch...

你好， My blog post today is going to be a little bit different. Today is November 20th. Do you know what that means? It means I have been in China for 3 months. Yes, 3 months! I can't believe how quickly time is passing, and each month feels shorter than the previous one. Even three months in we find new and exciting things so often. I decided before I came out to China that I would do 4, slightly longer than usual, posts every quarter. I hope to make these...