Wudaokou

I peddle for chuan (pronounced chew-ARE in Beijing dialect) outside of the bar I roll out of at around three o’clock in the morning. I’m a bit drunk, and as I walk across the crosswalk passing Chengfu Road I have a group of cab drivers without licenses hit me up for a fare on the north side. I honestly have no money left on me and I shrug accordingly, and they leave me alone without too much of a hassle. I keep walking along the street, keep seeing cabs whizzing by me in the direction that I’m walking probably going where I’m going, and I feel content with the pace that I’m moving at.

The sidewalk is composed of tiles, small rectangular tiles and not larger sheets of concrete, and these smaller gray tiles allow for light-yellow colored grooved tiles along the outside that are supposed to serve as a trail for those who have bad eyesight. As I playfully follow this trail back home, my head hits into layers of rhodedendrum-like leaves cut shortly to the height of Chinese, not Americans. As the leaves hit me in the face I feel better and not clumsy.

I pass under power lines much higher and less noticeable than the waxy leaves and I get back soon to the intersection where I meet all of the cabs passing into where I enter the university. It’s a mile walk from where I rolled out onto the street but my thinking about everything I’ve passed makes it seem longer. The guard station at dongbei menr lets me pass as I choose and I move slowly through the bikes and into the lobby and up to my room upstairs.