I would do it again

Before I left for China I had never set foot in Asia, never been a teacher, and I had never spoken a word of Chinese to anyone. Despite this, I had the best time of my life in China. I have never had so much fun and met so many new and interesting people in my life.

I was placed in Changsha in the beautiful and stunning Hunan province. The food is very spicy, but it's too good to miss out on. The nature is beautiful and the Avatar mountains (Zhangjiajie) is only a 4 hour bus ride away. People don't speak English here unless they're high school students, in their 20's or just happens to know English. There are plenty of foreigners here so I had no trouble getting friends that understood English.

My school (TianHua - Shazitang) was amazing and our assistants and teachers were great, helpful and very understanding. There was no doubt that they had had interns before and knew how to act around us to make the culture shock a bit more overcoming. They were funny, and accepted that we made mistakes and had a bad class once in a while. You know, we're not all born teachers. Even though we made mistakes, we were taken very seriously by the school. From the day one, our assistants told us that we would not be treated like interns, we would be treated like real teachers. We also got a lot of cultural classes at our school; kung fu lesson, paper cutting, calligraphy etc. I loved my school and I'm so happy I was placed there.

The ImmerQi team are professional and they are very relaxed. They will be more than happy to share their experiences with China and give advice to you. All in all they're really cool and not difficult to reach out to, which is really good for the younger applicants that most of the time are kind of confused and have a lot of questions. The advisors on the program were all really helpful, but especially thanks Duncan whom I became good friends with. Even though he was not in charge of my region he always asked how we were doing in Changsha, which was also where he was placed when he was an intern. He helped a lot in finding places I could go to in Changsha and during our training period he helped the interns a lot with their homework and hand-ins.

All in all; I would recommend this program to anyone who would like to try something different, likes kids and has no trouble being a authority person for 6 months of their life. It is challenging, but that's the fun part. To be honest, I would do it again.