Tuesday 6^th February, 2018 1100

All over now. Joan is currently on the bullet train back to Xian from where she will take another train to her hometown of Suzhou, Anhui. Suddenly my life seems very empty once again.

Apart from the frosty train journey over the ticket collection fiasco, the five days were wonderfully just like the old days. In fact even that train trip was reminiscent! One very good piece of news to come out of it was that despite Chizhou university bringing in sharpshooters last summer to cull the wild dogs roaming the campus, Mummy dog still lives on, a true survivor. She is by all accounts showing her age. She was there when I first went so she is at least eight, maybe nine years old. When you think her entire life has been spent outdoors, summer and winter, it's probably a more advanced age than your average, cosseted pet mutt. But I was so pleased to know she is still around and unbelievably still breeding!

I didn't take many photos during the visit, I already have the terracotta warriors from last time anyway. However, I took two in a small cafe we went to before entering the Terracotta exhibition. The house specialty was biang biang noodles, a dish with fettuccine-like noodles, cabbage and fiery spice. What was interesting to learn was the sign on the wall with one very complicated “picture” of Chinese writing was merely one character! It says “biang”.

Others were taken in The Cyclist restaurant, 

the Holiday Inn executive lounge

 and another in My Brother's Boat Japanese restaurant here in Lanzhou. 

Believe it or not, on the dish in front of Joan in Brother's Boat is a single prawn! I had never noticed it on the menu before (in the photo it just looks like a fish) but that will be a must-have next time I go!

The final picture was taken last night. She wasn't keen on dining out all the time and she always did like my cooking so she has been treated to fish fingers (she had never had them before), homemade chicken curry with chapattis (envious as she tried to make one for her family and it was terrible) and last night, homemade burgers with ridiculously huge patties (like those silly gournet burgers in pubs that require a skewer to keep them from falling apart) followed by apple pie and custard. I couldn't resist personalising the pie! She has a third of said pie in her bag along with snacks to help her survive the nine hours on trains and an hour on the bus once she arrives.

And you know, calculating the cost (I paid for her travel as well as mine) of trains, taxis (must have spent 600\ on cabs alone), food and an executive room in the hotel, it was about the equivalent of my winter travel allowance from the school. Because here she could stay FOC with me costs were low, had I gone to her I would have flown first class, stayed in the Hilton etc and it would easily have been double or treble that amount.

I have three weeks left before work starts again. It is tempting to get away somewhere for another couple of days!