Typhoon Day

Recall the glorious days of childhood schooling called "snow days"?  Well I have one today, SE Asia style.  I am currently in my apartment enjoying a "typhoon day".  Apparently it rained really hard all last night and hasn't stopped this morning, so  now there is no class today.  Which is marvelous because it was going to be a very long day for me.
I still have laundry and packing to do for my holiday -- October 1st is National Day, so I'm leaving on Saturday to go on a week trip to Xi'an with some other foreign teachers.  On a train, for 24 hours, in hard seats because all of the sleepers were sold out, because that's how you travel if you want to travel on National Day, because you are inherently traveling with a billion of your closest peeps. It will be a long travel, but hopefully a lot of fun and cool things to see.
In other news, I managed to snag cheap airline tickets for next June to travel around after the school year is up but my visa has yet to expire.  I'm going with a friend of mine here and the itinerary includes Malaysia, the Philippines, India, and Thailand.  So yeah, be jealous.
And in yet other news, I have an interesting but very Chinese predicament.  For the holiday, my school has gifted the teachers with... ready for this?... ten hairy crabs.  I told them that it was ok, I wouldn't know what to do with them (having never cooked a crab in my life and not entirely inclined to try) and that since I leave in a day I would have no time to eat ten.  But, in typical Chinese fashion, they will not take no for an answer.  So they have my ten crabs in the school fridge waiting for me and all of the teachers have been sending me recipes.  I would generally just ignore it and not go attend to the crabs, but I know China well enough to know that they will not just go away.  In fact, I think I heard them scheming to try and get some of my friends to come and "enjoy hairy crabs" with me.  I think I will give them to my neighbor family if they don't already have too many, I know the little girl likes them.

Ok, time to enjoy typhoon day.  It celebration, here's a link to make you smile (and don't think it's a solitary case, I saw two teachers with elastic sealed plastic bags around their shoes and feet this morning).
http://accidentalchinesehipsters.tumblr.com/post/9365898685/its-going-to-rain-a-lot-you-shouldnt-be

<3 Jenn