Excellent news!

The visa situation has improved!
I’ll fill you in with the back story. Because of the Olympic games getting and extending visas for China was made a lot harder. This meant that I couldn’t get a 90 day visa to cover my entire trip, I could only get a 60 day visa which is due to expire at the end of September. Extending a visa when the Olympic games were on was a major hastle, you had to open a Chinese bank account and have a minimum balance of 21000 Yuan – which is about 1500 pounds. Not only does this mean that you have to have 21000 Yuan but you also have to navigate the rather confusing waters of international money transfers.
Fortuantely now that the games are over extending a visa has gone back to ‘normal’, just in time for me! Now all I have to do is give the owner of the academy my passport, two passport photos and 900 Yuan (roughly eighty pounds) and he can post it off to some official somewhere and it’ll all be sorted with the minimum of effort on my part.