Hey! My name is Hannah, I’ve been working for Aihua since August 2014. I have been a vegetarian for over 10 years and I’ll admit one of my main concerns about moving to China was if I was going to be able to find anything to eat, and it was the questions I was most asked when I announced I was moving to China.

On my first day in China one of the Chinese teachers sent me a message to keep In my phone. It basically said ‘I’m a vegetarian, I don’t eat meat, please help me find something to eat.’ For the first few weeks I handed my phone to some very confused waitresses who then laughed and took time to point to every vegetable and piece of tofu in the menu. Most menus in Chinese restaurants are like books, so eventually I always found something! Continue reading →

Since arriving in Beijing one cold, blustering night three months ago, I have seen temperatures pick up, cherry trees blossom and old men roll up their shirts – embracing the age-old ‘Beijing Bikini’ look. I have admired Empress Cixi’s birthday gift collection at the Summer Palace, revered in the smoky incense of the Lama temple, toured the Forbidden city, marched around the guards on Tiananmen square and camped on top of the Great Wall of China. And yet I’m far from done – there is an abundance of history and culture at your fingertips when you live in Beijing.
When I’m not taking part in the aforementioned activities, I’m at my centre teaching. I say that in the most casual and offhand manner now, but when I first arrived in Beijing the thought of walking into a classroom full of expectant children terrified me. I had no Chinese, and they were just starting to learn English – how would we communicate? How would they understand my lessons? My fears proved baseless. Not only do we all teach with Chinese co-teachers, who are wonderful at supporting and assisting you should you meet any serious language barriers, but I soon discovered that I had underestimated how intelligent and deductive children are; even with the youngest classes, tone of voice and body language are more than sufficient to convey instructions to the students.
Though it’s not used in the classroom, learning Chinese is vital if you want to fully experience all that Beijing has to offer. Aihua provides lessons for all levels, and these are a great basis for learning how to navigate life here – order in a restaurant, direct a taxi driver, haggle at the market. However my favourite Chinese teacher is the lovely woman who operates the lift in my apartment building. We’ve struck up an unlikely friendship, and she has taken me, the building’s lost and confused looking foreigner, under her wing. Every morning when I enter the lift she teaches me a new word through actions, and every evening when I take it back up to my floor she quizzes me on that day’s word and corrects my pronunciation.
It’s not just my wonderful lift operator either, all the locals are incredibly friendly and disarming. When you eat out they’re always eager to come over to your table for a chat and a toast, along with a group selfie. If you move to Beijing, you can expect to end up in more photo op’s than you can count!

I have been living in Beijing for coming up to five months now, and I am thoroughly enjoying the experience. I feel that I have barely scraped the tip of the iceberg of what Beijing has to offer.
The city is dynamic and there is a great deal of variety here, and it caters to a wide range of hobbies and interests. I have found that the local people in Beijing are extremely friendly, and I am often impressed by their warmth and the lengths they will go to in order to try and help me out. Few people speak English here, so having an interest in learning Chinese makes life a lot easier for day-to-day occurrences, even if that means learning some basic functional language. Continue reading →

Hi there! My name is Andrea, but most people know me by Andi. In college, I studied International Business with an emphasis on doing business in Greater China, but my love for China started long before my degree. My dad has been coming back and forth from China on business for over 25 years, and I was lucky enough to fit in his suitcase on one of his business trips in the summer of 2006. Ever since then, I always told myself that I would move to China one day and learn Chinese. Finally, I decided to make an eight-year long dream happen, so I quit my corporate job, sold my car, packed my things into storage, and booked my one-way ticket to Beijing! Continue reading →

Hi there! I’m Nicky. I have been working for Aihua since August 2014. Before coming to Beijing I would have played a few open mikes and such around Belfast but it was rather limited. Coming to Beijing I found that it was possible to see and play live music almost every night of the week!
The venues are the best I’ve ever been to; ranging from hutong craft beer houses to Beijing’s famous Yashaow clothes market and from established rock clubs to a refurbished factory in the middle of the 798 art district. Regarding getting what you need, every possible instrumental need can be catered for, there are entire streets filled with specialist music shops. When arriving here, a guitar was as necessary as water so shopping for one in Beijing, I was like kid in a sweet shop. The music scene is bustling here, every week there are numerous live shows in every genre and western A-list singers/bands in the MasterCard area which is only two miles from Aihua’s main campus. In the school there are some very good musicians so building a band is not difficult. I myself have been playing in an Irish trad group with some other teachers the past couple of months also a few teachers play in a rock band.

Aihua held its annual dinner on Tuesday the 18th of February to celebrate the New Year and welcome the new staff into its family.
The dinner was held at the Dayali Hotel close to the Pingguoyuan Subway Station in Shijingshan. The food was delicious and everyone had a great time mingling and getting to know one another.
The night’s entertainment was provided by Aihua’s own. Almost every attendee took to the stage at least once during the night to perform a song or do a dance with his or her colleagues.
Highlights of the night included a puppet show of sorts performed by the marketing team, a few traditional dances by various Aihua teams and Chinese teachers from different centres and a hilarious dance interpretation of Lion King’s Circle of Life by Aihua’s newest foreign teachers.
Aihua’s foreign staff closed the night’s festivities with a special performance of The Fountains’ Build Me Up Buttercup (and an unrehearsed and unplanned encore performance of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsopdy. Just because.)
All in all the night was a huge success and wonderful way to kick off 2014. Here’s to the new term! May it be Aihua’s best one yet!