Weather report

It started to be wintery here. Sunshine yes, but a couple of days ago it suddenly became so cold, -- the wind and cold hands, and the sound of too many students sniffing loudly and blowing their red noses in the classrooms. It’s funny how you ask them something and they jerk up their heads from the tissue and look sheepishly with their red eyes, admitting they were not listening because they had a more important mission to accomplish. But they are proud that no matter what they showed up for the class to ‘learn some more knowledge’ and this feat is valued more than my plea to consider the others and myself – who do not want any of their germs flying around a confined room. Others don’t seem to mind. I don’t give them hard time for that though, I overall have become mellower lately, no longer that iron-fist crazy laowai teacher ;)

No central heating inside houses makes it warmer to be outside than inside in the daytime. A-ha, the South-China subtropical snowless winter is here!
And it’s only the beginning. I asked the students how they endure this, and the answer was simple - wear warm street clothes inside the dorms and spend much time under a couple of blankets. Hehe. Foreign teachers have air-cons with heating functions (and plenty of holes in the windows and doors), but I realized that for the past two mornings I woke up with my feet cold. Not a good sign. Gotta scrape up some courage and get myself a second duvet ;))

And I suddenly remembered an image from the childhood - do you know how the smoke from a chimney smells on a clear winter morning, mixed with the fragrance of the fresh snow which sparklesg under the sun? …It’s something acutely fresh and tenderly stinging in the nose... I’ve got an unexplained surge of happiness rising just at the shadow of this memory. Had this osmetic trip a couple of days ago, and another time just now with the gust of a chilly wind from the (closed) balcony. I guess I miss my old days. : ) But the main issue of this post is not the winter, it is --

Avian flu... Well, I don’t know what the picture really is, reading other blogs I might suspect the whole thing is (information-wise) similar to the 'abundance' of information on SARS 2 years ago. I remember my two times in the hospital in Lianyungang, having recurrent pneumonia but being assured that it’s not the untamed bug that’s ravaging around the country. I still hope it was not, but imagine the feeling. And this is not a very bright perspective, being shut off in a country with an epidemic and no information on how bad it already is or where it is going. Well, it sure is politically wise to prevent panic, but it’s still little fun to not know if there are any humans with the mutated disease possibly walking around and not being ‘seen’ because officially our city has no cases of H5N1. Hypothetically, that is. Why all this worried rambling? It’s just my musing on whether to take the following news as a disguised sign of approaching havoc or as just a routine precaution… I sure vote for the latter. Anywho, for these past two days on the first floor of our university there was held an exhibition of anti-bird-flu posters, cute in their cartoonish execution but pregnant with premonition – at least for my agitated mind. If nothing else, these pix may serve as an example of propaganda-pop-art here in the Middle Kingdom ;) Laughing students passing by those hand-painted artifacts and a lone untouched laowai taking pictures of them just add to the atmosphere of the normal flow of life.

All’s well and the sun is shining. Gets a trifle colder though. But as I often get it: “But in your country it is colder. You must feel ok”. And I guess I do.

And now - to the gallery: