Children's Day

Children's Day is June 1st in China, so every Sunday evening this month there will be a performance in the square from a different school. Last Sunday was the start, with very entertaining dance and music performances from small children in silly costumes. A group of children milling around the audience in costume noticed me, so I ended up getting 20 children interrogating me from every direction.

In the interest of saving money (this being a school which takes its students out of class to clean the campus) there are sometimes power cuts, another item on the long list of "things you will never be told about in advance". This is usually in the afternoon, because the Chinese like to have a "xiuxi" (rest) and sleep during the three-hour lunch break in the afternoon (yes, three hours). So, they assume you couldn't possibly have a good use for electricity in the afternoon, such as, say, being in the middle of a final exam on the computer that's due that afternoon, as I was yesterday. Luckily I had saved my work, and I waited around for two-and-a-half hours until the power was turned back on. I called Miss Mao to ask when they might be turning the power on, and she obviously had no idea they had turned it off in the first place. It's a pretty good lifestyle here, as long as you don't expect things to be run half as smoothly as they are back home. Cynthia, the American professor, probably gets the most frustrated here, and Gary joked that "she thinks she's still at a university".