I Never Heard of It

It’s my mother in law’s birthday. “Where are we having this dinner?”  “Down in Chao Yang.”  That’s about all I knew.  And I posited that piece of information with a location in my mind.  My wife called a car service and before long we were on the way.  “Please stop here at Starbucks.  Anyone else need anything?”  “Get me one of their lemon teas” says my younger one.  “Iced.”

I suggest we head in to the city the way I always do.  My wife suggests we go the way she always does.  Both can represent tremendous risk for dire traffic.  Both are likely to suck.  But I have my idea and she has hers.  My wife wisely offers that the driver should just follow his GPS and I willingly surrender and begin working on a syllabus of mine that is long overdue. 

He’s riding a left lane at a light and I assume he’ll swing back in to onward traffic once he’s gotten past the lead car but instead he follows the flow of traffic left and is soon up on a highway going, to my mind, the absolutely wrong way.  But perhaps he intends to use this as a way to get on the airport expressway.  I ask and he says something about going to the “second airport expressway.”  I have never heard of it. 

Later, we’re on it, heading south.  And I’ll grant him that the traffic flow is good.  But I realize now as I consider my own mapping app that we’re miles over into the east side.  And the traffic becomes wretched now.  We’ve slowed to a gridlock that is represented as red on his own app.  I speak up now suggest that this "shortcut" was suboptimal.  I tell my daughter who wants to go to the bathroom that it will be at least another forty five minutes.  But our driver says we’ll be there in ten.  I consider this and reckon, properly, that I do not know where we’re going. 

We’re let off at a tremendous, new mall that spans over the street and has its own subway station: The Chang Ying Station.  OK, then.  I’d never heard of you, either.  We’ll find the duck and our family up on the third floor of the mall.

Saturday April 1, 2017