The much anticipated family visit has come and gone. It seemed like ages since we'd seen them and I couldn’t believe they were really coming. I wondered how much the grandchildren would have changed. They’d grown a bit, but after a momentary reticence they all seemed pretty much the same.

Itinerary planning involved trying to find a tricky mix of things to interest the children while still letting the adults have a good time. I would have liked to show them all more of Lanzhou, which we’d been calling home for nearly seven months - but it’s hardly a tourist Mecca and you can’t come to China without seeing the Great Wall, Forbidden City and Terracotta Warriors. So after a night of "camping" in our little apartment, we all relocated to a hotel downtown for two nights before heading off for a couple of weeks to do the “must sees” - in Xi’an, Beijing and Shanghai. We at least did the Lanzhou Huang Miao markets, the Yellow River with its cable car up to the White Pagoda Hill on the other side and checked out the city centre and some local food. We were also determined to visit the new campus at Yuzhong, and after several time changes we finally got there on the Friday afternoon of exam week. Unfortunate timing, but a small group of students was delighted to meet the family, chat and take photos.

I’d been keenly anticipating the grandchildren’s reaction to many things. The different people, buildings, food, customs – not to mention the noise, smells, rubbish, crowds, spitting, smoking - in fact general chaos. I’d imagined horror at the squat toilets and mortified embarrassment at the split pants on the little kids. In fact they took it all pretty much in their stride, with the exception of the smelly drains and rubbish in the streets. Having said that, the city centres tend to be pretty clean in terms of rubbish, with gloved and masked, orange clad street sweepers out in force sweeping up every bit of rubbish dropped. The drains and small side streets are another matter though, but I won’t go there. The novelty of the squat toilets actually appealed to the girls and much of the time they insisted on using them even when there was an option of a sitter.

The food proved to be a bit more difficult, mainly for the girls. Isabelle survived on steamed rice for quite a few meals, and Charlotte consumed a lot of Milo. We filled up on ice-creams a fair bit and bought very expensive fruit like golden kiwi fruit (remember when they were called Chinese gooseberries?) to get some goodness into little tummies. Max on the other hand was happy to try pretty well everything and found he enjoyed most of it – even managed to tolerate quite a bit of spice and chili with unhappy results only a couple of times. Half way through the trip we discovered that “yellow chicken”, the Chinese name for which I can’t remember, was liked by everyone, so it became the first dish looked for on the menu wherever we ate. Fortunately it’s a common dish most places. We also ate at Pizza Hut and Macdonalds more times than we really wanted to.

Owen and I find we attract quite a lot of attention most places we go – lots of “hello, where are you from” and locals practicing their English. Western foreigners are still pretty uncommon in all but the most popular tourist spots. As a group of seven with three small, fair, children we were swamped. We were frequently stopped, people wanted to shake hands or touch the children, wanted their photos taken with them, wanted their own children photographed with them. Rarely with us adults – always with the children. As soon as someone stopped us, several more would crowd around, cameras or mobile phones at the ready. After some initial disquiet (on the part of both kids and adults) the kids began to actually enjoy the celebrity and more than once I heard “Oh another photo!” as one or another of the kids eagerly stepped up in front of the row of cameras. We felt like film star minders – allow a couple of minutes for photos then swoop in and whisk the kids away, waving “zai jian”. Otherwise we’d never have got anywhere!

Looking back we seemed to fit a lot into the not quite three weeks, but there’s an awful lot more I would have liked to do. I keep thinking of things I wished we could have done – a lot around Lanzhou, like the museum and the other cable car up the mountain behind campus, our local supermarket and outdoor veg and meat market, though perhaps not the zoo (not a strong point of Lanzhou).

Popular highlights with the kids, I think, were trinket buying at the markets, the overnight sleeper train Xi’an to Beijing, the high speed train Beijing to Shanghai, the glass bottomed viewing platform in the Oriental Pearl Tower (259m above ground) and the Terracotta Warriors. Not far behind were cable cars, tricycle taxi rides, the Great Wall and the Forbidden City.

The locals delighted in the few words of Chinese we taught the kids, “ni hao” (hello), “zai jian” (goodbye), and their age in Chinese numbers. They were especially amused by Max’s “bu yao” (don’t want) to the trinket sellers in the street. It was hard work at times travelling with three young children, and I’m not sure we got the mix quite right, but it was great to have the extended time together. It went by way too fast.