Pigs and Birds

We’re about two weeks away from Chinese New Year, which is the largest (by American standards, only) holiday in China. The upcoming year is Year of the Pig, which is my year (1971). Apparently, good things happen on “your year.”

Everything’s coming up Paul! I am gonna own Lunar Year 2007.

One of our neighbors has purchased a rooster. He was rising really early, like 5 am, but he’s getting lazy. I didn’t hear him until about 7 today. All the laowai in our building hope he’s for the New Year feast, because somehow a rooster is much more annoying at 5 am than construction noise.

A morning cock-call (heh heh, I said “cock”) is a sound from my childhood. My grandmother Souders (in Merna, Nebraska, population 400) had neighbors with chickens. So it’s actually kind of a comforting sound, especially as China does not appear to share any birds with North America. Bird calls, like the sound of freight trains in the distance, are the kind of noise that I never noticed until they were absent.