Paper Crane wishes

Detail
Also in Fudan University in Shanghai, students "prepare" for exams by making paper cranes to wish for good luck and tying them all over campus.

It made me think about the ways we express our wishes...

Fudan University is very collegiate in a sense that seemed very Western... or possibly very universal. There were big grass quads, big imposing buildings--mostly brick, lots of causally dressed students with different degrees of worry on their faces, and tons of bicycles.

On another note, trees all across China were painted half white like these are. I asked a random person who struck up a conversation on a local bus later in the trip (I continue to strike strangers as approachable, in China as well everywhere else I've been) about the white paint. He claimed it was a mix of lye and balloons (I think he meant rubber) and was meant to protect the trees from insects. Apparently all the painting happens in the winter. Sounds like a fiasco to me. lye and balloons..... um....