The school year in China is underway, bringing a new group of freshmen to campus. On this rainy afternoon, they assembled in the school plaza for firefighting training:
Most of their time is spent marching. For the last two weeks, we’ve been listening as they counted “yi, er, san, si” on the nearby field (click here to watch Marching Freshmen): 
Perhaps this group leader is inspecting the uniformity of pony tails:
Here is a picture of my students on their first day of school. Because of the coming holidays (“Victory Day”), about 20% were not present:
The Victory Day holiday (see previous post) was celebrated on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Like most holidays in China, the lost time had to be made up. Here is a shot of the new primary school students across the street on Sunday morning. As you can see, they start working as a group early in their lives:
The rainy season is upon us, with clouds and rain almost every day:
Here is an opportunistic umbrella salesman in front of our apartment complex:
And here, the students are taking advantage of a rare dry day to do their laundry:
We also find ourselves wishing for a clothes dryer – even though our laundry hangs inside of our enclosed porch, it takes about 3 days to dry!
Hope you all survive the rain! We haven’t seen much of that out here lately… Suppose it’s a good thing to keep the garden city living up to its name…
Yes, if we ever have kids out here we are getting a dryer.
Sam thinks the marching students are funny. 🙂
Definitely a reality of “the Spring City,” referring to the amount of rain we get this time of year.