Chickens in the Side Room and Other Mysteries

     Last night I walked down to the neighborhood store for breakfast milk.  There I ran into my neighbor, who had just returned from a 6-week visit with her family in the U.S.  While we stood by the yogurt drinks and caught up on news,  I caught a whiff or two of something that I didn't usually associate with a store.  Looking into a small room to the side, I saw the source:  two stacked cages, each with two light brown chickens in them.  I don't ever remember seeing live animals in this store before, except for the dogs that occasionally come in with their owners.  Have I not been paying attention, or is this a new venture?  I wondered if these chickens would end up in the meat case the next day, or if someone who was particular about freshness had ordered these chickens and would come and witness them being dressed.  Maybe they would be sold live to someone who was really particular about fresh meat.  Maybe the store owners, who live upstairs, like really fresh eggs or like the companionable cluck of chickens.*  

     A few more mysteries from the past week:

     •  On Thanksgiving Day, I stopped into a grocery store on my way home from school to look for some sweet potatoes.  I didn't find any, but walking away from the produce I went by a sliding-top refrigerator case with two heads of what had to be canines, looking very fang-y and mean.  We are in the Cantonese part of China, where anything and everything can appear on a table, but still....   I wondered how exactly this particular item would be prepared.  Does it purportedly cure some ailment, or is eating it nostalgic?

     •  Last Saturday morning during the Green Shoots English tutoring session, one of the custodial staff walked into the room carrying a sprayer with a yellowish liquid in the tank.  I told Andrew, the Chinese student leader, that he needed to tell her that she couldn't spray in the room while the kids were in there.  The woman loudly insisted that she had to do this right then and said that we could come back into the room again in 5 minutes.  That's what Andrew translated, anyway.  Before we'd all managed to exit the room, she plugged the sprayer into an outlet and started spraying the floor at the front of the room in front of the blackboard.  I walked out then so I didn't see what exactly she sprayed, but she couldn't have made her way around the room because she was was done and out of there in half a minute.  I assumed she was applying some sort of insecticide, as seems to be happening regularly on the grounds around the apartments where we live--though I didn't understand why she sprayed in only part of the room.  I found the whole thing quite upsetting, not just for our group of kids but for the kids who would sit in the room again on Monday morning. We moved our group outside onto the school playing field for the rest of the session.  Later when the tutors and I went by the room to collect our things, it smelled strongly of chlorine bleach.  Maybe this is a Saturday disinfecting routine? 

     •  Early this week, two pairs of 12' artificial trees appeared on either side of the broad steps leading up to the gate of our apartment complex.  These trees have small pink flowers and some newly emerging leaves, and there are red chenille stems wound around bandage-like on some of the lower limbs.  These could be Spring Festival/Chinese New Year decorations or Christmas decorations, or maybe both.   Chinese New Year is two months from today, on February 2.  So the timing would be comparable to Christmas decorations going up in the stores in the U.S. at the end of October.

* Tea Partiers in the U.S. would find this sight so heartening:  no business-stifling government restrictions preventing you from keeping live chickens a few feet away from the goods in your store!  Avian flu?  No outbreaks reported, why stomp on store owners for a mere possibility?  Think of all the tax money saved--no licenses, inspections, wasteful paperwork.