Happy National Day
Today (October 1) is National Day here in the P.R.C. It celebrates the founding of the nation on Oct 1, 1949 in Tiananmen Square. It’s the reason everyone has a week of vacation, and its the reason that the city is draped in Chinese flags all of a sudden (of course, no country in the world goes as all out with flags as America, though).
Since it is a political (and recently created, relatively speaking) holiday, it doesn’t have a ton of tradition the way some other holidays like the Mid-Autumn Festival, Chinese New Year, the Dragon Boat Festival, etc. do, but with any luck we’ll at least get a decent fireworks display and I imagine there are ceremonies being broadcast on TV for those who are into that kind of thing. I haven’t watched Chinese TV since the Olympics ended.
There should be some new video stuff up soon, including a pretty interesting interview a friend and I did with a Taiwanese tourist we ran into. The raw footage is about twenty minutes long, and entirely in Chinese, but I’ll have it up as soon as I can cut it down to size and translate everything. There’s some other video too.
Oh also, the old roommate showed up at my door this afternoon, which was quite a shock. I greeted him with a pretty cold, incredulous “What are you doing here?” and he looked shocked I wasn’t happy to see him. Turns out he was just in town for the day and wanted someone’s phone number, which I gave him. I was pretty curt, and I didn’t let him come into the apartment, so he asked me what my problem was. I told him that somewhere between insulting my entire family and intentionally trying to embarrass me in front of coworkers, I had lost all desire to ever see or speak with him again. He said OK and left, so with any luck, that’s that.
