Air Raids and Pumpkin Carving

The morning was one of the greyist morning I've ever seen. Even at 7:30 when the sun had, I presume, full come up it was so dark that I had to turn on the lights in my room to see. I think it was a combination of tire fires, which I'm told are currently happening, the incredibly thick fog that comes with all the humidity here, and the general overcast nature of the day. The effect was that even standing outside in the middle of the day you couldn't possibly tell where the sun was in the sky. My classes went pretty much as normal with the exception of the sirens that kept going off through my first class. They sounded something like air raid warnings that you see in old movies, or the noon whistle in Athens. I asked my students what they were and they didn't really know or seem worried. One of Bryan's students said that they were some sort of alarm but she didn't know what. With the constant fireworks and their complete disregard for anything approaching a warning I think that Changzhou could be bombed for hours before anyone noticed. In fact I think if the kids saw a building explode they would just think it was faulty construction. I never did really find out what was up with those sirens.

After class, and I had 6 hours today, I agreed to meet up with Dave and Ken to do some work for the Halloween party tomorrow. They have invited basically every student on campus so I have this image of a thousand students trying to cram into this room and absolutely nothing happening. We needed more apples for the bobbing for apples thing so we went to the closest store and bought basically every apple we saw, totaling about 80. We took these back to Ken's apartment and then went back and did it again. After that we did it for a third time. The people in the store were getting a big kick out of seeing a bunch of crazy Americans just buying up every apple that they could get there hands on. About 200 apples came to about 200 RMB which is about $30. That means we paid about 15 cents per apple. Not only that, despite not looking that great the apples here are delicious. They're probably right off the farm or something. David told me that when they had been buying candy for the party they went into a store and just basically put all the candy on the shelves into bags, much to the amazement of onlooking children. I just know that there are now a bunch of kids who will grow up with this image of America as some magical place where it just rains candy. Well at least that would explain the weight problem.

Next we went to a big supermarket slash department store to get even more things for the party. We picked up a bunch of cookies, again to the amazement of all around us. The funniest thing was when we were trying to pick a fruit of neck passing, when one person holds it in between his chin and neck and another person tries to take it without using his hands. We were just standing around trying to pass various fruit from the neck of one person to another. All the time Ken was dressed up like a cowboy, his Halloween costume. I wonder if they thought it was odd or just wrote it off as an American thing. While we were there David saw a good price on a bike, about 25 dollers and decided to buy it and ride it home. We also bought a couple of pumpkins, though they were the size of the small one you see in displays in store windows. Finally, after dinner we all got together with one Chinese student and carved the pumpkins. It took a while since we only had 2 knives and 1 spoon. We made some pretty good faces on our little pumpkins and I hope the students are really impressed to see them tomorrow.