Superstition

I recently learned that there is a lot more to the superstitions of these people than what is on the surface. In fact, I now wonder how many of the things I see and participate in during my daily life are caused by a superstitious fear. In America we have talk about fengshui as a decorating term, but here it could mean life or death. My university is under construction. Much to my inconvenience, the front gate is currently closed because they are moving it about 5o meters east of where it used to be. I originally thought this was because of the new library that is being built, but a friend told me Sunday that it is because of fengshui. The original gate was directly across the street from the hospital. Apparently, this has caused several deaths among the professors at the university. I thought that this was unusual, so I told a teacher from my old school. She told me that they did the same thing there. I was aware that the gate was changed and I thought it very peculiar, but I had no idea that it had to do with superstition and fengshui. This particular gate was too narrow and too low so it could protect those living within it, and some teachers either got sick or died because of it. In a culture that says it is based on science, reason, and logic, how it that places of higher education are manipulated by unreasonable superstition? It teaches me something. A culture is not always what it seems on the surface, nor is it what it would like outsiders to believe it is.

This is the outside of my apartment. My kitchen window is the top one on the left. I love living on the 7th floor!

After talking about buying a bicycle for quite a while, I finally did it. I feel so much more Asian! Riding to school here is certainly nothing like riding to school in America. Never in America did I get stuck in a traffic jam created by a horse-drawn cart, follow a whole bedroom suite down the road (riding on the back of one bicycle), or have to weave in and out of vegetable and fish carts in order to get to school. The challenge is to see how long I can keep this bicycle from getting stolen. Bicycle theft is a popular trade around here, and seeing that I didn't buy my bike on the black market, it is prime target.