It's a feeling I wasn't expecting to cross again--the rough caress of an ostrich wing, but this time I didn't intend to get close enough to touch one--I just wanted a friend to. I had had enough the first time.
"What do you want to see in China?" I asked Briana as soon as I heard of her plans to visit.
She had 10 short days, but the Chinese have a penchant for the freaky so if that's your thing, it could be any host of odd and otherworldly things you could see--a wall you can supposedly see from space is just the first on a tourist's list, but after 8 months--it's actually quite tame on the Richter scale, I've learned.
An ostrich, she told me, her first and only real request. It was reasonable. A picture of someone riding one is certainly awkward and leaves quite the powerful and lasting impression on the mind. I remember my first time...
It was the first item added to her intinary of odd China. In a country so big, even larger than America by the space of a Florida or so, you have to pick and choose in such a short space of time. Paul Theroux, a famous travel writer, details its vastness in his book, "Riding the Iron Rooster." It took him a full year to ride each train, touching all the far reaches of mainland China. One long year.
A local in Japan, Briana had already become intimate with the quirks of Asian living. Squatters cross borders all throughout this half of the world. This fact made planning simpler, in fact, more narrow. I knew just what we both needed. Refreshment. I had the same itch last semester, right around the holidays. Asia can get wearing, especially living in a large, booming Asian city that offers little to a white, female waiguoren, an outsider. It's no secret Asia loves the white male, the true foreign hero. As chicas with not even a small hope of fitting in, we needed refreshment to its grandness, or in other words, a dose of mini America, without the post-guilt after eating at McDonald's.
I already knew the perfect prescription--Shanghai.
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