Painting Trees

Its something I've touched on in a number of other posts but I think its one of the most common feelings I've had here in China, most of the time I simply have no idea what's going on. Some of my students in the small class, the one that's going to England, asked me how I coped with traveling and learned to adapt. Basically what I do is just go with the flow and do mostly whatever the locals are doing. Today for example they were doing what looked like painting trees. There were a bunch of guys with big buckets of what looks like white paint and paint rollers going all over the lower half of the trees on campus. They weren't exactly in a big hurry since I saw them going to class and by the time two hours later I came by with a camera they had moved about 5 trees on. I knew it couldn't be paint, honestly just thinking "hmmm who would want to paint trees," isn't enough to make me believe that they don't paint trees in China, was that it smelled terrible. Half the campus reeked of this smell which was sort of a cross between wet dog and bad eggs, though leaning toward the dog side. When I came with my camera there was about one guy working while the other just sort of talked and watched him slowly work, so I guess things aren't all that different.