back to shanghai

Another early morning to trek from heze to Zhengzhou airport to fly back to shanghai. My parents don’t trust my ability to get to Zhengzhou and figure out how to transfer to the airport shuttle so my dad took the day off to go with me there. Sheesh. I guess it was good considering the airport shuttle tickets had sold out and I ended up in some private car with 3 other strangers. Quite the entertaining drive tho… I got in the car with these 3 strangers. The driver took us to some other area to be picked up by another car.. a larger one with another passenger in it already. Man that driver drove so fast I so wished I had my seatbelt on. So this black Honda suv/minivan mix… not sure what it was.. maybe an odyssey… had all sorts of horns and bells and whistles attached. No joke, this guy would sometimes beep his car horn, then sometimes use a buzzing noise that cops use, then a siren like an ambulance… and swerve in and out, in between tight places… it was nuts.

I’m a seatbelt advocate in all situations but when seatbelts aren’t available because drivers have them tucked away, there’s not much you can do. My dad is actually more strict than I am apparently. Sometimes if he needs to take a taxi somewhere, he’ll show up at work with a grayish black streak across his body… marks from a seatbelt collecting dust since it’s never been used before. I was in the car when a taxi driver told him… “oh you don’t need to wear that”, but my dad insisted that he did and did indeed pull that seatbelt on. My dad also pulls out English at random moments to Chinese people, not even realizing he’s speaking in English and the people have no idea what he’s saying… so American.

I’m now back in Shanghai. Trying to coordinate one more meeting tomorrow morning. I’m not really sure how that’s going to work out if it will at all… in fact it kind of stresses me out thinking about it, but I’m putting it into His hands… if it works out, it could only be His hand at work… if the door closes, that is fine too.

Also when I stepped into the Shanghai airport, it was like a breath of fresh air. When I stopped in the bathroom in the airport, oh man, it was so nice and clean… and regular toilets! I know that when I had written about coming from Taiwan to Shanghai and how unprepared I was by the smells, noises, and people of China… well, I guess I adjust easily to the circumstances around me… cuz now I was so happy to be back in the same city that I had commented negatively on just a couple weeks ago. It’s all relative I guess!