A bomb or a birthday?

Boom....
Bam....
BOOM BOOM...

An amusing (albeit sometimes unsettling) facet of living in China is the frequent rumbling in the distance. Being completely unaccustomed to this, my initial fear is, "Are we under attack? Who would attack Zhengzhou?"
The reality is the complete opposite--fireworks are exploding in the distance in celebration of something, like a birthday, an anniversary, a wedding, etc.

On a different subject, a colleague shared an interesting quote that made me think about our culture "To understand a culture, study the un-translatable words." In Chinese, there is a word Jiang4 酱， which they use to describe every sauce, from ketchup, mustard, salad dressing, mayonnaise, jam, jelly, to soy sauce. Like the eskimo tribe that had 12 words for snow, we the English have our toppings that a Chinese struggle to understand. Cool.