Last week I took my son out for a walk in his stroller down to the aquarium street near our house.  To explain, this is not a road fully encased in glass with bubbling deep-sea diver statues hanging around, but an alley that has a plethora of stores that all sell the same things, aquariums.  There are other streets around Shanghai that have themes.  There’s the music area that sells instruments, sheet music, amps.  I’ve seen an entire square block that every store sold toilets, all different shapes and sizes.  The best is the row of about twenty-five, 7-11 sized stores that cater wholly to hair and nail care.  If you every need to buy 3000 hair driers and 5000 sets of press-on nails, you will not walk away unsatisfied.
Anyway this particular area that we, Petrus and I, were headed has about 15 to 20 stores that all sell aquariums, filters, fish, little plastic bridges to go in the tanks, as well as the animals that reside there.  We had purchased two turtles about a week before for the US equivalent of a dollar and a half and a nice 30 gallon or so tank for about 25 dollars.  Petrus and I headed down there because we noticed that the turtles water was getting quite cold and we needed to get a heating pad for them to sprawl out on.
I know so far it doesn’t seem this way but, this story really has nothing to do with turtles, but everything to do with the ever-surprising nature of China and the goodness of people when you don’t expect it.  I also noticed that I’ve had the need to use a lot of hyphenated words in this story.  Hmm?
On the way home from obtaining our heating device we stopped at Starbucks to keep the ever-looming (another one) caffeine dragon at bay, I mean, enjoy a nice cup of Joe.  We got our beverages to go and headed out to walk the one block trek home.  When we got outside it had started raining, not too hard, but enough to get us wet, and cold.  After we walked about a hundred yards away from the coffee shop a young man of about twenty sidled up to me and offered to hold his umbrella over Petrus in his push-chair.  In fairly good English, he asked where we were going.  I pointed across the street to our building, he just nodded in agreement.  He walked with us all the way up to our apartment door, standing out in traffic, making sure it was safe for us to cross, shielding Petrus from the rain, and lifting Bubba and his stroller up the five steps to the entrance.  I thanked him graciously as he shook his head nonchalantly and said “No Problem”, then turned and went on his way.
Thank you Sir for bolstering my faith in humanity.  So many times I get rammed into, pushed out of line, stared at for not just a little bit too long, but all it takes is that one person to justify to you why you live in this city of twenty-some million, and make you appreciate kindness.