Behind the Rubber Flaps

Just passed the Longmont.  That’s the time honored Shanghai outer-urban, inner urban marker in my mind.  Cabbed it this evening.  Need to feed the CMCC beast before they will let me use 4G anymore.  My wife tried three places.  They were all closed with some sort of network error.  It’s no big deal I thought.  “It’s not a big deal”, I told her.  “I’ll just get a cab in the cab queue.”  I think I envisioned the cab queue as I said that.  And, getting into the airport tonight I didn’t call a Di Di, as I couldn’t.  I just joined the cab queue.  I believe I can honestly say I have never seen it so long as it was this evening.  And I’ve stood in that line at least a hundred times.  Frightening.  I just kept walking backwards hoping to find an end to the line.

It moved swiftly.  Good-on the young Shanghainese security guards who walked right up to a woman who tried to nonchalantly blend in, not far in front of me, beyond the stringed-off barrier.  Shanghainese know how to manage crowds.  “Don’t cut the line.” I couldn’t resist saying as she was escorted back behind the place where I was in line.  I removed my coat.  It’s hot and before I shoved it in my bag, I pulled out my book, which I’d been trying to finish on the plane, as I wait for my luggage to come out from behind the rubber flaps on the conveyor belt.  “The Three Body Problem” had been mentioned by a number of different friends and while there were moments of interest, I didn’t really enjoy it.  I went through the last twenty pages, chewing up time in this line.  All of sudden the narrator’s voice changed dramatically and I realized I’d made my way into the acknowledgements. 

I asked my driver to flip on the air con.  It’s hot in here.  The air is muggy and still.  Hey, you know it works just as well when you roll the window down.  Here I’ll do it for you.  I was tempted to bark something at him, but I let it ride.  It doesn’t matter.  I rolled it up when we were on the highway.  He rolled it back down when we were stuck in traffic.  Yes, there is a jam at 12:15AM, at the exit ramp to Xizang Lu where they were doing some road work.  The city is awfully crowded at this late hour. 

Now I’ve stared a book that’s been on my bed side for a while: “A Concise History of Brazil” by Boris Fausto and Sergio Fausto.  It’s one of the three books I got a month or two back and have been waiting to dive into about Brazil.  Thirty pages or so in the cab ride considering the brutal slave trade that moved four million lives or more lives from the Atlantic coast of Africa to Brazil.  Unfathomable, impossibly horrific there in Brazil,  as it was anywhere.  Arriving now, one more time at this hotel.

Monday, 6/10/19