Tour day so another early start. We headed off to the Siberian Tiger Park this morning and drove through the tiger areas then watched them from a viewing point. We then had lunch at a remote village location before heading for out starting point for rafting. In pairs we were given a blow up dingy to take us for a gentle ride down the river. At least it would have been a gentle ride if the locals hadn't thought it would be hilarious to see how wet they could get t...

Day off today so made the most of it by getting up early and coming to the internet cafe. Ended up spending a few hours there then went back to the university and did a few hours work on my first assignment. This afternoon a few of us got a cab and went to visit the church of Saint Sofia. It was beautiful and there was music playing next to it with a fountain that danced to the music. We decided to take a walk from there to the 2 temples in Harbin but unfortunate...

More Vocabulary and Grammer work today and we were set the first of our assignments towards our final certificate. Mandarin lesson was much better than they have been. We learnt numbers - much more useful than being able to tell people I'm a Korean foreign student!! Mandarin corner this afternoon was fun - it been set up to help us practise our Mandarin pronounciation but only 3 of us turned up so we had 2 chinese speakers each to talk to!! Started my assignment ...

Hot water at last this morning - we haven't had any since we arrived - so wished I got up a bit earlier for my shower! Breakfast was the usual affair - don't think I'll ever get used to having rice for breakfast, or eating it with chopsticks! Vocabulory was the topic of this mornings leactures then this afternoon we had Grammer. I never know how little I knew about the english language. The Brits we actually put into a seperate class to learn the basics whilst th...

Lectures today in "Classroom Management" and "Vocabulary", then this afternoon we had our first taste of teaching as we were tasked with teaching a small peer group an activity. It went well alough I'm sure teaching 30, 9 year olds will be very different from teaching 6, 20 somethings!!! Another mandarin lesson this afternoon . After dinner (rice and veg again!!) a few of us formed a study group to do our homework and then moved out to have a ...