Chicken Little and his friend

In my posting last weekend, I mentioned that some of our neighbors have purchased some loud animals. It's not the best picture, but here is the evidence of Chicken Little and his friend:




I'm not sure how this whole owning a rooster thing works, but I continue to be entertained by the situation. Until they wake me up, then I'm just annoyed.

On a different note, one of the Chinese teachers is getting married next month and we are all invited to the ceremony. I must say that I'm very excited to see what a Chinese wedding is all about. I've been hearing bits and pieces over the past weeks from her, but it will be great to experience it. Not that I'll understand much of anything, but that's half of the fun.

Halloween is coming up and we're trying to put together some sort of school-wide celebration. It will be interesting to see how it turns out since most of our students seem to know little about the holiday. The decoration part of Halloween could be challenging, given the complete lack of supplies. I don't even have anything close to a costume either--I guess this is where "I have no choice but to be creative" part of living overseas comes in. Any case there are concerns, please note we are treating this as an American cultural holiday, not the pagan ritual that it really is.

So ever since National Holiday, the amount of fireworks found here in Wuxi seems to have grown exponentially. Unlike America, there are no cute little fireworks stands or anything on the corner of the road, so I'm not really sure how these explosives are acquired. All I know is that people insist on setting them off at all hours of the day (and night!). Take last night as an example: As I'm getting ready for bed at like 11, someone is setting off fireworks. Not just two fireworks, but they continue for probably five minutes. I'm pretty sure most of the people in our building were sleeping. Oh well, I hope they were heavy sleepers.

Tonight we will venture into the city in hopes of getting haircuts (not me though, sorry!), finding paints (to make a zoo in the gym), and buying a new keyboard (my almost 5 year old laptop has written one too many papers). I'm sure there will be stories to tell later.

Until then--peace
rpm