No plan. No map. No idea where we were or where we should head to first. Now this is the way to explore a city. Annika and I took five minutes to figure out the Shenzhen subway system and then got on board the train. We arbitrarily got off three stops later, made our way above ground, and started our urban exploring. We had emerged in a pretty non-descript commercial area with lots of concrete and eight lane highways. God bless Annika, she was being a real trooper. We had just spent a week on the Mainland so Annika was pulling her wheeled suitcase and I was wearing my large thirty-pound backpack. We took turns carrying the large-brim straw hat I had bought in Yangshuo.
It was approaching noon, so our first order of business was getting some lunch. After a week of Chinese food, I asked Annika if she would be up for some McDonalds. Absolutely! We walked for a few blocks, turned a couple of corners and there it was: KFC. Close enough? I asked. Close enough, she said.
While eating our extra-crispy chicken sandwiches, Annika noticed the locals at the adjescent table were pointing at my straw hat that sitting on top of our stack of luggage. They were talking loudly and laughing. Annika was mortified. She scrolled through her mental rolodex of 53 Mandarin words and came up with “teacher.” What she wanted to say was “No, you don’t understand, my dad’s a teacher and he is buying this for his classroom. He didn’t buy for it himself. He bought it to educate American youth about Chinese culture.”
But what ended up happened was that she just kept pointing at me and saying “Lau-shi” over and over again. Somehow, I don’t think they quite got the full message. I’m pretty sure all they saw was an oversized white boy walking around this major metropolitan area of 14 million people with a straw hat that old Chinese women wear while working in the fields.
The little dollop of KFC mashed potato stuck on my lip probably didn’t help any.
If there had been a hole handy, I am pretty Annika would have crawled in it.
-Jack
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