Back in San Antonio, my friend Stacey had asked me to pick her up from the airport. It was full summer, and for those of you who haven't been in San Antonio in the summertime, you know that expression 'hot as an oven'? Well, I like to say San Antonio summers are 'hot as downwind from an exhaust pipe.' (Which means when you actually are downwind from an exhaust pipe, things get really unpleasant.) It's quite common for there to be a temperature difference of 35-40 degrees between indoor and outdoor air during a San Antonio summer. True story: I had a small heater at my work desk and turned it on in the summer, not winter, because the air conditioning was on so high in our building I froze to death at my desk. So anyway, I go straight from the gym to the airport to pick up Stacey. It's 10 pm but still around 100 degrees outside. Inside, it's a balmy 60 or so. Gotta give those tourists a false sense of comfort! I'm pacing a bit in the baggage area wa...
Last night I was taking the bus to a friend's campus and sat down next to a grandma. Now, in the words of my friend Patrick, "Chinese grandmas are the sh*t." It's true: they can do anything and exude a quiet confidence I aspire to. (Also, they can totally snake all the good veggies at the market before anyone realizes what's happening.) They rule with a silk fist. You don't mess with a Chinese grandma. And to a Chinese grandma, all the world's a grandchild, especially a lone foreign girl. I sat down next to grandma in my short skirt and knee-high boots, sans stockings, and she immediately began chastising me for being bare-legged. I explained I don't have stockings, and she started running her hands up and down the bare-showing parts of my thighs, trying to warm me up. After a year and a half here, this didn't faze me (haha, I first wrote "phase" me), but I still had to laugh at the image of a Chinese grandma feeling up a random foreig...
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