Teaching lessons this morning and then we had a cultural class on Chinese Music - a local "celebrity" came in and showed us some of the traditional instruments played in Chinese music. This evening I went to Walking street with Michelle, my roommate. Walking Street is the main street in Harbin - it's a pretty cobbled street full of shops and restaurants and in the evenings it's got a great atmosphere as crowds of people gather there. We had dinner in a ...

Another day in the classroom - today we were focusing on Games and listening activities for kindergarden. This involved us pretending we were 6 years old and participating in activities including pretending to be particular animals and making greetings cards!! We were missing 5 people in class today as some kind of sickness seems to be sweeping through the students. In the past 5 days I've actually had 4 people throw up in front of me! I just keeping everythi...

Got up early to go for a run then walked to the street market to try and get some bananas. It was only 7:30 when we got there but it seems as if even this is too late - many stalls were already packing up and the ones left only had a limited amount of fruit and veg left to sell. Came back for morning classes then this afternoon we were put into groups for our teaching practice so that we could start putting together our lesson plans. We're given a lot of help ...

Discovered my favourite chinese breakfast today - bread dipped into condensed milk!!! It's been on offer a few times but I'd never tried it until today and it's delicious! Another day in the classroom today but then instead of our usual Mandarin class we had a cultural class on Chinese knots. We were supposed to be making a lucky charm, but 40 students with one teacher didn't work so well and most of us didn't get past the first stage of making the hanging loop! ...

The end of the weekend and many people were tired today having spent most of the night completing the first assignment for today. It was a fairly easy start to the week as we have a new teacher who thinks it's okay to finish everything early and get out. Mandarin lesson was a complete waste of time as she spent 10 minutes talking to us all then the rest of the time going around individuals whilst the rest of the class waited!! We all decided we'd had enough of ri...