Been here for 3 weeks now and still no serious problems or issues. Loving it in fact. Pretty much got into the groove of teaching, lesson plans, eating spicy food, relaxing in the evenings, heading down to the local street-food market and navigating bus routes and exploring the city. It's not a bad life so far. And Changsha seems to get better and better the more we discover. Last Friday Fiona - one of the Chinese teachers we share our office with - showed us there was in fact a second and superior bar street in Changsha. We found a great bar that offered all you could eat and drink for £5 each and then headed to little live music venue where a 'famous' electro outfit from Beijing were playing. It was a fun night - possibly the best I've had here so far.

Old bar street

Freedom house club

Also last week we took a pretty intrepid step in food exploration. We ate snake. We'd asked a local stall if it was possible to eat it round here and were directed to a nice guy who told us to come back at 8 the next night for some tasty snake. Dunno about the others but I assumed the snake would be all cooked and ready when we got there. Oh no. First we taken to a back alley lock-up full of snakes and other live specimens to chose our snake and play with it. Then it was dragged back to the market, killed, skinned, gutted, spiced and served to us. It was good... tough but good.

Not much other news really - except that Anna, Cassandra and I are all booked to travel to Inner Mongolia for 'Golden week', which in a Chinese national holiday in first week of October. Quite a few people from the TEFL course in Beijing are going too, so should be great to catch up with old friends and see how their placements are going.