early April update

It hit 70 degrees yesterday and 73 degrees today. It was also really humid. I thought it was raining outside when I first looked out the window this morning. It turned out to be just a steamy, warm fog. It felt almost tropical and in the middle of the day someone turned on the air conditioning in one of the classrooms. So the weather is nice now but it is going to be uncomfortably hot in a month or two.

Last Friday was a holiday called Qing Ming or Tomb Sweeping Day in English. I ran down a road on my jog that I had never been down before. There was a small cemetery next to a trash-filled river. It was an odd coincidence to come across my first cemetery in China (cremation must be much more popular than burial because I had not seen any cemeteries before then) on the Tomb Sweeping day when people visit their relative’s graves to clean them up and leave flowers. Each grave had at least one brightly colored plastic flower and a few had large wreaths of real flowers. A group of nicely dressed young people entered as I left. They gave me a strange look because I was wandering around the cemetery in shorts and a sweat-soaked T-shirt.

Not much else happened that day. The next holiday is May Day in just over three weeks. It used to be a weeklong holiday but was shortened to four days this year. Although it is the Labor Day inspired by communists in Chicago decades ago, it has ironically become one of the biggest sales and shopping seasons in China. The National Day in October and the Chinese New Year in January or February (both weeklong holidays) are the other two government mandated holidays that coincide with seasonal sales at most stores.