As I am sitting here writing this, I can hear the music signalling lesson end/beginning drifting through my window... I swear that sound will haunt me forever! This week started well. I arrived at school Monday morning to be greeted with ‘Happy Women’s Day’ and being told I have the afternoon off! Brilliant!

The rest of the week has been great, really settling into life here and I love teaching the children! They are so enthusiastic and really throw themselves into the games and activities in class. I love how excited they get! I’ve been left on my own a lot more as well, which I like. The classes are all going really well and I’ve been getting some good feedback from the teachers, which is always lovely to hear. I had another opportunity on Wednesday to watch a demonstration lesson by one of the Chinese English teachers. Their lesson structure and teaching style is very different to how languages (or any subjects!) are taught back home. A lot more drilling and reading, but this teacher had also got some students to act out some scenes and videoed them to show in class which was so funny, and a great way to elicit what was going on in the story! The children were very quick with their responses, so the pace of the lesson was really sharp. A lot to learn from teaching here, for sure. It was a grade 6 lesson, and afterwards the grade 6 teachers treated me and my flatmate, George, to lunch where we had a lot of food ordered for us to try – including pigeon and lots of spicy dishes. Was lovely! Beats canteen food anytime (the canteen food is a bit hit and miss, and rarely recognisable...)

Another fun trial this week was sorting out our hot water (or lack of it) problem. After attempting to ring the gas people and not being understood, I took it upon myself to draw a picture of the canister and then set off on a mission to find a Chinese person to ring up for us! As I left the apartment, I bumped into a lady on the stairs and asked her. She spoke not a word of English, but with the help of my pictures and (bad) acting skills, off we went to her apartment upstairs where she rang a number for gas, and spoke loudly down the phone, then wrote something for me in Chinese characters, of which I understood nothing – but nodded, smiled and said thank you a lot, as I don’t really know much else yet in Mandarin! Within half an hour I had a phone call from someone speaking Chinese, and I figured they were probably trying to find our apartment. I went down and lo and behold, there were the gas men. Fabulous. Only, later on the hot water STILL wasn’t working. So we ended up ringing Amanda, our port of call for all problems, she is an absolute angel. She came over and fiddled with the heater machine and now it’s working.  We probably didn’t need new gas at all....but a hot shower later and life looks much better always! It’s turned cold here. Slippers weather...brrrrr (although I’m sure my friends ‘up north’ might disagree with my idea of cold!!!)

English corner this week was much better. I have been given a small class (20) of the more able grade 3 students to work on their speaking for a competition next month. The children are starting to get the confidence to talk more and so it went by quicker and they seemed to have fun. I had them describing pictures of animals I drew on the board, thinking about likes/dislikes as well as appearance. Then I got them to use the words we put up to tell me all about the animal character we created. Most of them had a go, and it’s great for me cos I might get a chance to actually learn names in this group as I have them twice a week! Bear in mind I teach about 800 different students...

This evening I have cleaned the apartment again – and I found a cockroach!!!! NOT GOOD!!!!! Apart from that though, things are wonderful. I’ve now had my first Mandarin lesson, which focussed on learning the sounds – which I still find hard! Will be fantastic when I can start to understand and speak some more though...however interesting it might be to get by with pictionary and gestures...

That’s all for now! Looking forward to seeing what this weekend has in store for me!

• China 2010
• China internship
• teach in China