Wednesday 1^st November, 2017 1815

Tuesday evening's meal went better than anticipated. I fed Annie, Sunny and Gill. The ham turned out perfectly, I actually found off-season pineapple in BHG so made a sweet sauce for it and - bonus – decent potatoes right at the far end of the markets around the corner.

Even the pastry for the apple pie turned out decently. If only all my culinary efforts could be thus!

At the end of a long day today I am looking forward to having tomorrow off. I may have a bash at making mince and vegetable pasty type things for Annie and myself for our dinner after the pastry success and now knowing where to locate mashable spuds.

I will also need to pack an overnight case. I have now received instructions re the speaking competition and actually I am quite pleased. Whenever Kevin went as a spectator he always left on Friday afternoon and returned after closing on Sunday.

No idea if it is simply Gansu or the format has changed but there is a meeting of judges and laowei questionmasters on Friday evening, we are being billeted for Friday night only and will finish Saturday night. I know it is too much to hope that the hotel will be one which serves western breakfast and to be fair I did assume with my living locally I would be expected to stay home at night. It will though mean I will more than likely be fed Friday dinner, Saturday breakfast (I will pass on that), lunch and probably a closing dinner Saturday evening – after which I will probably have to get my own taxi home.

Irrespective, it is indeed an honour to find I am definitely one of the only two foreigners asking questions. I realise I was the only choice my school could have asked because Annie is essentially disbarred due to Peace Corps rules (they sound more and more like the Salvation Army to me, the more I hear!) but the fact is our uni was chosen as one of two in the whole of Gansu province (and there are ten in this city alone). The UK is 243,000 square kilometres in area and this province is 426,000 – that offers some perspective on what it means, at least to me.

Even better, unlike Chizhou, the contestants are only asked one question after their speeches, not one from each foreigner. That neatly avoids the questionmasters confounding each other by occasionally coming up with identical questions! We shall toss for odd or even numbers.

So I shan't lose the entire weekend, Sunday is mine. I just wish I had a decent blazer or jacket that fitted but shirt and tie will have to suffice – unless I wander to the underground market tomorrow and they have anything that fits.

I confess that to some extent I was dreading the ordeal (although not the fact of being in the spotlight) before but now am quite anticipating it with pleasure. It is not often here I get to meet western faces or even new Chinese ones.