I went to a ‘Chinese corner’ at my Chinese teacher’s house at the weekend. The idea being that all his various students got to meet each other and practise their Chinese.
It’s a pretty odd idea, speaking Chinese to a bunch of other foreign folk when you live in a country of 1.x billion Chinese people. It was good to meet other people doing similar things to me, despite talking to them in Chinese. Reminds me of when I used to teach English and insisted (in vain) that the students should talk English to each other, regardless of the fact they had a perfectly good language in common already. They must have hated me.