A banquet at a restaurant with all the teachers from the Foreign Languages Department! What better way to finish the first week here? No it wasn't in our honor. It was the usual (it seems) way to end the departmental all-day planning day. We were invited and of course were thrilled to go. The evening involved lots of delicious food and many toasts of "chuc suu khoe!" (good health) and "bottoms up" (The locals here are keen on English colloquialisms). Many toa...

Well, here we go again – another assignment with AVI. Arrived in Hanoi 13th August for two and a half weeks of in country orientation and a crash language course before heading to our destination at Quang Ngai on the central coast. There we'll be doing much the same thing as in Lanzhou with me looking after the domestic front and trying to find something useful to do.The language is scary but interesting. Vietnamese has 11 vowels (not to mention another...

Stock feedingAn old man sitting on his little stool on the footpath in the main street of Dunhuang, with his three goats tethered to a street tree and munching on the weeds growing round its base.Locking upStaff at the Dunhuang railway station were busy preparing the train for the return journey. Passengers in the waiting room were watching the scurrying about on the platform through big plate glass doors. A disabled passenger was ushered through to board the tra...

We obviously weren't going to make it to Tibet. With the new placement in Vietnam back to back with only a three week break in between, we weren't going to have the anticipated month to travel after the semester ended - and Tibet was still closed anyway. The next best option was a Tibetan Semi Autonomous Region, so we decided to make a final excursion to Xiahe in the Gannon Tibetan Autonomous Region in the south of Gansu.We caught the bus, there being no ...

Just before leaving Perth I was given the book Journeys on the Silk Road by Joyce Morgan and Conrad Walters. A fabulous book, I enjoyed it immensely. It tells the story of Aurel Stein's travels to Dunhuang and, some would say, plundering of the ancient Mogao Grottoes. I was excited to realize Dunhuang is in Gansu, the province we’re living in and visiting the caves has been a priority since we arrived. I was beginning to think we wouldn’t make it,...