Rainy Days In Hometown

It's been decades since my last visit to my hometown after my family came to America. Living here these years, we learned, worked and survived in this part of our world. What happened in our howtown has basically become sort of 'out of sight and out of mind' things. Somehow, the rainy days this week reminded the rainy season back in my hometown, humid and wet verywhere including the floor inside the house when it's severe. Driven by this impulse,I searched 百度(www.baidu.com), the predominate search engin in the country, trying to learn something from it. It's pretty cool that it returned many information. I could look at the map of the town in its satellite images. I could browse all kinds of the web sites, from the local government, commercial business and local schools. What I was interested in was those local schools' web sites. I attended several schools through my childhood. It's amazing that they all have their web sites, primary school to high school.

Here are the schools that are still in my memory.

* Nanwen Elemantry School(南文小学)

I wasn't old enough to remenber clearly if I attended the kindergarten at this school at that time when I stayed in this school with my mother. My memory about it gradually has faded away. However, I still have a vague memory of one incident that I ran few miles from our home to this school alone after I got upset that I was ordered to stay home and couldn't follow my mother to the school. The school as I rembmer now had some traditional Chinese-style buildings with red walls and green decorative elements on roof-top. Particularly, its main building was tall and splendid-- a big oval-shape stair leading to the first floor and a fancy balcony with hand-crafted fence on the top level with a big bell, as seem in the church, that served as timer to signal the beginning and ending of the class. It's said that the big bell, if struck in certain patten, was also served as an alarm of all kinds of emergency because the sound could be heard within a few miles...