Friday 27th April

Today is sports day! I was up and ready to leave the apartment at 6.30am this morning and shared a taxi to where our sports day was being held, which turned out to be the Para-Olympic stadium!

All of the teachers were there early to set up for sports day and the kids and parents arrived at 8am. We started with an opening ceremony where each team (red, yellow, blue, green and orange) did a cheer and dance for their team.

The games started at 9am and I was with red team grades 3,4 and 5 and it was the weirdest sports day I have ever been to! The sports day was set out with five different stations and each team had 15 minutes at each one. But they went to each station as a team and did the station together instead of it being one person from red, yellow, blue, green and orange. The person with the best time was the one who was put on the score card and the other teams had to beat that time. It was weird because usually on sports day you are cheering for your team, but everyone at the station was on my team! It certainly was a bizarre day.

Sports day ended at 12pm and all of the teachers stayed to pack everything up which didn’t take long. I had told Matt to be back by 1.30pm so I headed back to the apartment and was waiting for him at 12.50pm. Now Matt had the keys so I was sat on a bench outside my apartment waiting. It’s a good job it was a nice day because Matt had misjudged the timings and didn’t turn up until after 2pm!

We packed our bags for our trip to Inner Mongolia and then got a taxi to Pinnacle Plaza for lunch. We went to the Avocado tree for a burrito, I love the food there then got a taxi back to the apartment to get our stuff together and leave for the airport at 5.45pm.

We got to the airport and were in the queue to check in for 45 minutes in what felt like the hottest airport I’ve ever been in! It’s a National holiday so it was the busiest I’ve ever seen it. We finally got to our turn and were told that our 7.50pm flight had been delayed by two hours. We went off to get a drink and because it was so windy we could see a few flights had been cancelled. I was starting to worry a bit about what we would do if our flight was cancelled as I didn’t know what to do and it was hard enough to communicate when things were going well. Luckily we checked in with no problems and went through to the gate where we had to wait around for another hour. Our flight finally left at 10.30pm, 2.5 hours late! But the flight was only 45 minutes and we landed in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia at 11.15pm. We got a taxi to our hotel and were both so tired we just wanted to go to sleep. We checked in but our room stank of cigarettes, I went back down to reception with my phrasebook (neither of the receptionists spoke English) and tried to get a different room but was told that there weren’t any.  The room is nice but I’m having trouble putting up with the smell.