This is Nonie, right there on the left, next to Lara:



Nonie's a Canadian - she hails from Penticton, Victoria. She and her husband are finishing up the end of a two-year stint in Harbin, and she's a woman with a lot of energy and a lot of time on her hands. On this particular day (several weeks ago) as we were walking to Wal-Mart, she explained to Lara and me that she had a project (well, she said "proe- ject") in mind. Someone had given her a bunch of balloons, and she thought we should papier-mache them into Easter eggs and hang them outside our dorm.

And so it began. A supply teacher from way back, she's got the papier-mache thing down to a science. She cut up a gazillion newspapers and mixed a few gallons of paste, and invited everyone she knew to come and make the eggs. Here's Stage One:



And here are the first batch of eggs drying on Nonie's balcony:



(It's nighttime. They look like ghost balloons.)

Then, a few days later, we started in on Stage Two:





She decided it would be a "girls' thing." And it was totally international; in these pictures you see people from Canada, the US, China, Japan, Iraq, Iran, the Philippines, and Russia. And the eggs were stupendous. Those of us from egg-dyeing and decorating parts of the globe turned out nice stuff, but the folks who had no prior knowledge of the concept came up with really, really cool, out-of-the-box designs that just astonished me.



We had eggs drying everywhere for a while there.



Then on Friday evening, we started decorating the lobby - we had to abandon the plan to put the eggs outside because it's been pretty consistently rainy here lately (I blame myself; the rain started immediately after I bought my rollerblades) and we didn't want our hard work to go to waste. We asked the boys for help with this - some of the trees are pretty tall, and so are some of the guys. (Before we started, a couple of people went down to ask the dorm staff if it was ok to put up the eggs - it took two phone calls to different bosses, but we did finally get the go-ahead.)

Here's Nonie explaining the game plan:



There were a lot of people helping.







And there are a LOT of eggs.



One hundred of them, to be exact.

We spent a long time decorating the trees in the lobby, but didn't get them all done.









So on Saturday, I and Lara and my two Chinese teachers finished up hanging the rest from the second-floor balcony.







Looks pretty cool, huh?

And here are some of my contributions.





Well done, Nonie!