Today I had older children; they come from the local schools to improve their English with a real English person! They were about 8 – 10 years old so the lesson had to be a lot more structured than with the younger kids. I still rode the E bike to work but something had gone wrong with putting it on charge last night so the battery was almost flat by the time I arrived. It took several staff members and some frantic calls home to work out that the battery could...

Now I have become more confident the ride to work on the Ebike has become really nice. It can be very cold but it is good to have my own method of transport, especially one that gets me from door to door without having to worry about finding a taxi or a bus. It was the last day for most of the children today as they won’t be here tomorrow so I decided to make Friday review day. First of all we went through animals and clothes then I used the flash cards that c...

Today I rode the Ebike all the way to work on my own. The route is actually quite easy so my worries about getting lost were not great, but the worries about other bikers were. In the end it was fine, I arrived on time and didn’t fall off or cause anyone else to! Today in class we looked at favourite foods and types of food, another vocab lesson. I hope to start making some resources to make the lessons more interesting as I only have flash cards at the moment...

Today I decided that the bus was too long, the taxi too expensive and it was too far to walk. I wasn’t confident enough to ride the Eped on my own so Vincent gave me a lift work on the back and then he was going to come and pick me up after. The journey went well although the roads are quite crazy with cyclists and ebikers cutting you up at every opportunity and even when there wasn’t an opportunity. My first lesson was on clothes so we all looked at the clo...

Today was my first day at work. Getting there proved to be difficult, I wasn’t yet ready to try the Eped (electric moped) and the bus route was too complex for me to be sure I would be on time. I decided to take the taxi to work then bus home so I could work out timings. The taxi driver had other plans however and spent the next hour driving round the long way through an entire tour of the outskirts of Suzhou industrial area. They get paid by the kilometre here...