恭贺新禧!
While February 14th is known as Valentine’s Day (情人节) to many of us, to several billion people this year, it marks the start of a new year on the lunar calendar — a.k.a. Chinese New Year. It’ll be the Year of the Tiger (which, come to think of it, is the year most of the CAPS Class of 2008 are born in…), so I think it’ll be fitting to have some pictures of felines, which were exceptionally ubiquitous on the Beijing University campus:
When I got to Beida, one thing that surprised me about the stray cats on campus (besides the fact that there were A LOT of them) was that they…well, they looked awfully good. I mean, check out their coats:
The next cat, by the way, does have two front legs and two eyes, it’s just that it has a very thick coat and it was reaching out to get down from the sidewalk.
Their large fluffy coats are probably largely in thanks to the Lost Angels Club, a student organization that leaves food at various locations around campus for the cats (which explains why there’re so many). They even built little houses for them:
During my last week at Beijing, a friend I met through the Violin Society brought out Niunai (牛奶, which means milk), a cat that apparently has quite a reputation with the students on campus, for me to meet. Niunai isn’t a stray, but stays inside 老地学楼 or 老化学楼 (I forgot; it was one of the buildings in front of the library), lovingly cared for by teachers and students — she gets a lot of visitors bringing leftovers from their dinners.
While Niunai was a good sport for the first 5 minutes when I was cooing at how adorable she is (honestly, can/does anyone disagree?!), but at 5 minutes and 1 second, she started getting annoyed because it was cold outside. Like almost-single-digits cold. Niunai gave me a glare and looked away, which I deserved.