Saturday is most definitely the day for weddings, and yesterday I witnessed not one, but three couples entering banquet halls.

This is a very strange sight to observe, as the bride and groom walk up a red carpet with firecrackers exploding around them, and I found myself holding my breath as sparks landed just centimetres away from the masses of material each bride was swathed in.

Sadly, these will be some of the last weddings I’ll be seeing as I was later informed that next year according to the Chinese calendar, the groom of any couple who marry will die, and the only safe day to get married will be 10/10/10.

The year after that the bride is predicted to die, and the year after that, both the bride and groom are, so I guess Hollywood was right and 2012 really could be it...

After lunch in a restaurant that had somehow managed to run out of rice, I spent yesterday evening practising English with Li Ru by examining magazine articles, and after much consideration she had concluded that Jordan does indeed still love Peter Andre.

Both Li Ru and her mother are were in awe when I produced a copy of Heat magazine, and to my surprise found the orange, emaciated look to be very beautiful indeed. Li Ru has also now decided on an English name - Carol, although whether this is after Carol Vorderman or not has yet to be determined, and I will call her by this name in future posts.

After this we watched Prison Break, which I’d never seen before.

Despite some of the acting being incredibly bad, it’s very addictive and we ended up watching an unhealthy number of episodes until the early hours of the morning.

Today we met up with Alice and Olivia, two Project Trust volunteers based in Dìngxī, which is a couple of hours south of Lanzhou.

We ate our first Chinese KFC, which was deliciously greasy, and the girls introduced us to apple flavoured milk, and apart from the weird aftertaste, it wasn’t actually that bad.

It was great to talk to some native English speakers, especially ones our own age, and it sounds like they’ve been having a great time.

In other news, we have decided to head to Tibet during our time off for Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) and so have been busily reading up on everything from Tibetan monasteries to altitude sickness.

It was the only place that we were both really enthusiastic about visiting and we’re off tomorrow to sort out our permits to enter the region.