One advantage of being an older person living in China is that the mid-day nap is completely culturally acceptable here. Lunch "hour" is 90 minutes long or two hours in some places. Many of my colleagues at school take a brief nap after lunch. They just lay their heads down on their desk and fall asleep (actually, some students do this in class as well). The department managers have folding camp beds. The fact that eight people share one office is no deterrent. 


The farmers, as I mentioned when I was talking about the corn harvest, set up sleeping cots while they tend the drying corn. 

In this city, it's not uncommon for men to offer to carry women's purses for them. I've seen couples at the mall with a man toting all the shopping plus a pink purse.  My male colleagues offer to carry my heavy computer bag when we walk together.

This was a revelation to me. i started thinking about the times when Ross and I went on vacation in years past, I was the one with the large wicker beach bag. Ross would give me things to carry in the beach bag, like the camera, brochures, map, beach reading, suntan lotion, and so forth. If it didn't fit into his pockets, it was mine to carry. 

I didn't really question the Order of Things. Then I came here to the other side of the world...

​While searching the Zibo area in Google Maps, I noticed that there was a "Cemetery of Revolutionary Martyrs" on the outskirts of town, not far from the school. I gather there was no shortage of martyrs in Shandong Province. Even if you survived the brutal Japanese occupation and the civil war, you could still be executed by the Communist Party's "Traitor Elimination Bureau" or be eliminated by a political rival for being a Trotskyite. 

What better day to visit the cemetery and contemplate the hardships that this region endured than October 1st, National Day, the anniversary of the day when Mao proclaimed the new Chinese Republic from Tiananmen Square? 

October 1st marks the first day of a three day national holiday, which is extended into seven days off by re-scheduling some classes. For the last few days we've heard the happy clatter of wheeled suitcases rolling over the brick pathways as students returned to their homes after only three weeks of classes. The city buses were crammed full and the taxis, both licensed and unlicensed, couldn't keep up with the flow of students heading to the bus or train station...

Last spring, the farmers harvested a grain crop -- I'm gonna say wheat but I don't know for a fact -- by laying it out on the side of the road to dry and thresh it. I never got any good pictures of how farmers used blacktopped lanes, roads, boulevards and parking lots on the outskirts of the city to process their crop because I was always in a bus or a car and couldn't get a good shot.  But a few weeks ago, we spotted this little pile of corn by the roadway leading to the school. This is not sweet corn -- it must be for corn meal or popcorn. The kernels are hard.

Well, that's interesting, we thought. So I snapped a picture. There you go -- some corn.

Then more corn appeared in the lanes that line the boulevard and we soon realized that first little outbreak of corn, that was nothing....