A full day today starting with breakfast at 7:30 and then straight into a lecture on "Teaching Vocabulory". This was followed by "Classroom Management" and then lunch where I desperately tried to make up for my terrible efforts at mandarin. More Vocab this afternoon and then another Mandarin lesson. It was much better today - yesterday she refused to speak English for the full lesson which isn't a great help when you have no idea what she is s...

We were allowed a lie in this morning so breakfast was at 9:30. It was lovely to get proper plates - no more tin trays!!! We had an introduction morning and then after lunch it all got serious with our first TEFL lectures and manderin lessons. We even had homework this evening!! There was a welcome dinner this evening where we all got dressed up (as much as you can when you're travelling) and had an amazing dinner with all the things you'd normally get from your ...

Early start this morning so that we could pack up our stuff and load up the bus for the next leg of our adventure. After breakfast we headed off to Splendid China - a minature village of all the tourist attractions in China. We saw the great wall, the terracotta army, the forbiden city, etc - it almost felt like cheating! After 3 hours here we headed to Schezen airport where we were booked on a flight to Harbin where we arrived at 2:00 in the morning. The accomod...

Having a real problem with jet lag - couldn't sleep last night then didn't want to wake up! We all throw ourselves into the team building this morning - playing games and singing songs until lunch time. This afternoon we had our first meeting with some Chinese children when we went to try out our new games and songs on a local summer school kindergarden. It must have been quite daunting for them to suddenly see 70 European people heading towards them and they all...

Saw blue sky for the first time today - however, it was accompanied by a lot of rain! Toast for breakfast which was very unexpected - didn't think we wouold get bread here. We all headed to town for the morning and wandered around the market and local shops before heading back for lunch - rice and vegetables (they split them out from the meat today). The other guys on the programme seem really nice although I am one of the oldest. There's only 4 people over 30 an...