After our days of being tourists were over, we travelled to a lovely hotel in a different part of Beijing in preparation for our 2 weeks teaching at a English Summer Camp. The hotel had actual beds and everything you could possibly need; toothbrushes, bottles of water, gas masks and torches in case of a fire - you know, the essentials.

Getting into our room proved quite a challenge. After Emily (The volunteer I was sharing a room with) and I struggled up to our rooms with our bags keeping us from moving our necks more than 45 degrees, we were quite shocked to discover other people's belonging in our room, the maids who were cleaning the floor were also quite confused. The situation was resolved quickly enough when one of the maids hurriedly called me over to a room she was cleaning and shuffled me into the bathroom to take a phone call to the front desk on the toilet phone, instead of the more obvious bedside phone. When Emily and I finally got to the room we freaked out at the possibility of spending two weeks in such a nice place, our dreams were quickly shattered however as we were told we were actually boarding at the summer camps.

They say that first impressions are everything and I feel like Tongzhou Summer Camp took that to a new level. We started out by being put into dorms that highly resembled prison cells with bars on windows and metal bunk beds included. We then went for dinner in the school canteen, I was looking at the food wondering what was gluten free when the leader of the summer camp saw me and guided me to a sign that would accompany all my meals which read - 'Allegric To Teacher Special'. For the first week, my meals consisted of boiled vegetables and plain rice, it got to the point that if I saw another piece of broccoli, I felt I would decend into a vegtable induced maddness. However after a talk with the host they realised that I wasn't allergic to anything with a slight taste and the food got amazingly better (Well, except the prawns that still had their heads, tails and shells attached).

The opening ceremony of the summer camp was spectacular, the room was filled with cameras, banners and official looking people. All of the foreigner teachers sat in the special T-shirts they provided us and waited for the ceremony to start while listening to some English songs in the background. We took no notice until one of the teachers said in a shocked half shout, half whisper "Listen to the song!". The song that was playing was 'Like A Robot' by Aqua, this song goes into quite graphic detail about drinking, partying and has a very inappropriate chours about doing something like a robot. The crowd of officials, Chinese teachers and 12-16 year old students didn't even flinch but we foreign teachers were lost in a sea of hysterical laughter. The rest of the ceremony went well, there were very passionate speechs, a flag waving and we were all gifted with an 'Imitation Of An Ancient Small Screen' ... I'll let you try to figure out what that means.

We were split into different teaching groups, My group consisted of fellow volunteers Rachael  (My PT partner) and Sophie. We also had a TEFL teacher called Dan, who the students nicked-named Egg Uncle (My nickname was Snow White, so I defiantly got lucky!)

We were a really great team and had a good mix of individual and group lessons. My favourite classes were always the last one of the day as all four of us would get together and play games with the students which they loved. We broke out all the old games we remembered from primary school such as Fruit Splat, Corners and Duck Duck Goose (which we renamed Polite Polite Rude). The students are so competitive that any concern for health and safety was forgotten, one game of Fruit Salad ended with the littlest of the class, Kevin spinning across the floor in the fetal position laughing the entire time.

We taught Juniour 4 which had the lowest level of English at the camp. Some people would dread this but I feel like our class had the most fun, though I am pretty biased. They tried so hard with every activity and improved so much in such a little time. An example of this would be one student named Olivia who looked at us terrified on the first day and didn't want to speak at all to being the loudest person in the class by the last day screaming "NO!" Whenever she felt a game was unfair. We also has a student called Jane who had the best English in the class, she asked us lots of questions and even helped us translate to the class when they were struggling to understand us, she even gifted all of us with a beautiful calligraphy scroll.

Giving gifts is a big deal for Chinese students, we received so many cards and gifts on our last day. One of the students called Kitty gave me three different cards all beautifully decorated and featuring EXO (A Korean-Chinese boy band that are very popular here). I told Kitty that they were my favourite band on the first day after seeing her EXO bracelet and I've never seen such a shocked expression!

The students are very protective over their teachers. One day, I did a joint class with some of the other Project Trust volunteers, Fraser and Diggory to show the students British playground games, the lesson went really well! At the end the students from the other class began asking their teachers for hugs and pictures - a common occurrence here in China. When the girls of my class saw this, They all ran up to me and almost smothered me in a group hug, even picking me up and taking pictures so that I didn't feel left out. It was a very sweet moment!

Some other highlights of the two weeks were teaching our class 'We Will Rock You' and 'The Cha Cha Slide' as well as creating our class video with our slogan "One summer camp, one hot dream. We are winners!" (We did not create the slogan, for clarity). As well as a group of us teachers huddled round watching the penultimate episode of Game Of Thrones violently shushing anyone making a slight noise.

The summer camp also had a closing ceremony which featured performances from the students as well as us. Our class sang 'You Raise Me Up' and though our audio messed up, The class pushed through and did amazingly and I even felt myself tear up through pride. The foreign teachers then got together to perform 'The Cha Cha Slide', which the students loved! We then had to say good bye to our students, though it was a short time we were together it was quite hard to say goodbye and the girls in our class were even crying and I felt like bursting into tears as well!

Our two weeks at the summer camp the first proper teaching experience for many of us and I don't think it's one we will easily forget.