Fire drills in China are AWESOME.

American school kids have found memories of fire drills because we got to line up and file out in the middle of class, to stand somewhere far away from the school and wait to be let back in.  Mostly, we were happy that we missed five or ten minutes of class every month.
Fire drills in China are apparently a little bit different.
This morning I'm working in my office when all of a sudden a loud alarm starts going off.  I am less alarmed than one might imagine because the alarm is less of a shock than the air-raid sirens that went off last month (I think that was an earthquake drill?), and more just in the mood of oh-boy-what-now.
I walk outside and into a cloud of billowing orange smoke. Yup.  And children sprinting by towards the field.  At fire drills here they literally set off smoke bombs to make a more realistic effect, and the students are encouraged to get to the field as fast as possible.  It was so much more exciting than back home.
On the field, they even did a fire demo where they repeatedly lit a can of wood on fire and let the administration try to put it out with fire extinguishers.
The timing for every student to get there little butts on the field was 24 seconds.  24 seconds for a school of about 800-1,000 students (still not sure on the count) to empty out.  I was extremely impressed, but apparently that was a whole 7 seconds slower than they had done last term, so the kids got criticized haha.
So, in summary, fire drills here are awesome.

Also, thank you mom for my camera phone, without which I wouldn't have been able to capture this surprise.

Sprinting through one of the smoke bombs

Hurrying down the stairs

Fire demo on the field