(Apologies in advance to those on Owen's email list, you’ll have heard some of this before. I felt the need to record stuff about Lanzhou, for completeness. Sorry, it’s the librarian thing)

Lanzhou is a long spreading city bisected by the Haung He (Yellow River) and hemmed in by mountains north and south. There are promenades and parks along the riverfront – some beautiful, some in need of major repair. In fact, like much of the city, chunks are indeed undergoing major repair.

On weekends, all are full of people - sitting, walking, eating, drinking or even dozing. Kids playing, people flying kites or walking dogs. (I’m surprised at the number of pet dogs here – usually small, and often decked out in the most amazing gear - jackets, jeans (!) and tiny shoes. I’m dying to get a photo, but they move too fast). There are many sellers of food, drink, balloons and other stuff, and groups gather to play music, sing and dance. There are also public courts for playing table tennis, badminton, volleyball and basketball. Along with the exercise machines in every street and outside every building, the Chinese have lots of activities available, and tend to use them extensively.

There’s a busy pedestrian mall with a maze of little shops underneath its length. There’s a square with a big patch of grass nobody’s allowed to walk on, a huge screen at one end, another underground maze of shops and a roped off area for feeding the pigeons. There are lots of temples, mosques, and parks. We haven’t really scratched the surface yet.

I’m still surprised at how few Western foreigners there are in Lanzhou. There must be others about, and we arrived just too late for a City dinner for foreign workers (for the National holiday) where we would have met people working at other institutions. Not counting the other teachers here, we’ve only seen 6 or 8 since we arrived. We startle people (especially emerging from the toilet cubicle – the woman next in line actually yelped once); they stare (sometimes come up for a close inspection); sometimes they’re quite amused. Some want to meet us, shake hands or have our photo taken together. Mostly that’s either old people from out of town who find foreigners intriguing, or young students keen to practice their English.

We visited the new campus and climbed the mountain behind with some students one weekend, and came across a group from the neighbouring university having a picnic. We were immediately surrounded and plied with questions and food and drinks. Another weekend we went to the museum. A group of students saw us and immediately began following us around, surreptitiously taking photos – until one spoke to Owen. Then they all pounced, chatted away and we had to line up in turn and take photos of each other.

Lanzhou (indeed all of China) is on the same time zone as Perth, which is convenient, although we are a good way west. At present it gets light just after 7am and is dark by 6pm. The weather is getting colder and the other day I looked out the window and saw a gentle snow falling, disappearing when it hit the ground. It only lasted about an hour. A few days later it snowed all day, but again disappeared straight away. The winter is the dry time here, so we’ll hardly get any snow we’re told.

The university is nestled into the side of the mountains - the land falls away sharply below us and rises sharply behind us. The city campus was established in 1950, is old and leafy and is where the staff in university housing live. (The new campus is about 50km out of Lanzhou, is modern and sprawling, and about half the students live out there. Owen’s teaching is all on that campus, crammed into three days, and that involves an hour-long commute each way. Tiring, but he’s really enjoying it.)

Our apartment building is right in the southeast corner, by the xiao dong men – the little east gate - and we look out across the city. The road in front of our building runs down hill, across the railway line then down again to a major road at the bottom. The land falls away sharply from the road in front of us and there’s a massive construction effort in progress building a huge retaining wall and road below us. The land then falls away again to the railway line at the bottom of a deep cutting. The trains rumble past and "converse" in long musical blasts at all hours, and the construction workers work well into the night, so it’s a pretty noisy place to live. Luckily I’m a very sound sleeper.

The construction workers live in tents on site (as indeed they do downtown where there’s a huge undertaking going on to replace the footpaths in several major streets) and there’s quite a community down there.

There have been several large concrete pours on the retaining wall across the road from our building, and the whole thing is heading east at a fairly rapid rate. I think soon the formwork will be past us and round the bend. Maybe things will be a bit quieter then. Alternatively, we may soon have a busy new road half way down the hill.