Moving to Beijing to work for Expertise Education with my friend was a big mistake. I have worked in various countries for company's that can be frustrating at times but Expertise Education were terrible. The staff will say anything to get you to do what they want.

1) Apartment: Faeces and urine over the floor, black walls, broken and smashed windows, on the 18th floor with all 3 elevators broken, no internet connection like promised and broken beds. (Not the homley, clean and safe apartment promised).

2) School close to apartment: An hour and a half commute each way is not close. When I said this I was told I was lucky because most Beijingers commute 2-3 hours. (Told in interview we could cycle to school).

3) Medical: Be prepared to have an internal exam. We weren't warned about this and the staff member who showed us to the hospital left us so we couldn't communicate and only knew what was happening when the doctor started pulling at our skirts. Another teacher with us had a seizure while queueing for his blood test and no one helped. The Expertise staff member came back half hour later and told the teacher to finish his medical even though he was lying on the floor, white and we told her he'd just had a seizure.

4) Expertise Office: No one here communicates with each other. We were given so much conflicting information. Told we had to start at a school only to go there and find someone else in the office had given the job to another teacher. Told to go to an interview at a school and then changing the location again, and again, and again. Asked why we weren't at an interview when someone else had called from the office saying it was somewhere else... etc.

5) Free Mandarin classes? It would have taken us nearly two hours to get to the expertise office for our mandarin class.

6) There were no other teachers living in the area we were placed. We were completely alienated.

7) When we went to the Expertise office to discuss our issues we were told we had no other option and no choice.

8) When I was Ill from school one day and called the office to let them know they sent someone who banged on the door continuously until I answered it and told me I should be in school and I would loose my job if I didn't go. Also tried to get my passport to keep in the office. DO NOT give them your passport.

9) The visa they get you to come into the country on is illegal to work on. We were told we would have our working visa after training which never happened. We had been there for nearly 3 months when we left and still no sign of getting us our legal working visa as promised. Also, we NEVER got paid in the time we were there because of a huge list of ridiculous reasons.

There are plenty more things that I could go on about but it would take a lot of time. The bottom line is we had a terrible experience and were devastated to come home. We spent a long time preparing to go to China and a lot of money as well. We tried very hard to be optimistic and make the best of a bad situation but in the end we were so miserable we gave up and came home. You could be one of the lucky ones. I still keep in contact with teachers who are still working there who are in an apartment that's clean, within an hour of their school, who've met other teachers to socialize with, only needing to have minimal contact with the company. Just PLEASE don't rely on the information they give you in the Skype interview. There are many other teachers like myself who have been discarded and treated like crap by this company and you could be one of the unlucky ones on a plane home.