Light's Fright (formerly Lightwielder in China)

Tiny Delay [Again?...] (Chapter 15)

Chapter: Tiny Delay [Again?...]

Outside the zoo, while we waited for my Ar Jo's friend, there were a great many things that caught my eye.

An arch rose over the sky that proclaimed, "Zhengzhou Zoo!" in Chinese and English. Its posts were on the sides of the entrance. A large dark green topicary of a tiger mounting itself on a rock was just in front of the entrance. I could see a large atrium inside the zoo boundaries, but for what it held, I wasn't certain. Don't atriums hold birds?

The sky was clear of all clouds and almost a shade of blue. It was still mostly smoggy gray. The temperature was a little uncomfortably hot, but no seat beaded from my forehead yet. No sigh of trouble, but then again that zippercut was unexpected.

Carts full of balloons for sale were on my left, with cute cartoon characters and especially ones of pandas. To my right, there were toy swords carved of bamboo, some little toys, and then goldfish swam around in tiny containers.

Ar Jo was on the phone with his friend. They were talking with lots of spirit at first, but eventually Ar Jo got angry and slammed his cell phone shut. He hopped into a taxi and sped off without us.

"Uh, your Ar Jo's friend seems to be having some difficulty at the subway, so he's gone to help him." explained Jie.

Maylin asked me, 'Would you like to go for a quick cab ride until Ar Jo gets back? There's so much of Zhengzhou you haven't seen yet!"

"Sure." I piled into a cab with Maylin, Jie, and Lixue. Cheng and Li Qiang stayed behind at the zoo entrance, moping about that they'd been left behind.

With the bright sunlight revealing new details to my eyes, I saw the true beauty of Zhengzhou's architecture. While nightlife and color-changing lights filling the city are pretty too, because I'm a lightwielder, daytime is obviously more enjoyable for me. Though strangely, I'm becoming more and more acquainted with the dark. I think that's a bad sign.

I saw an old style clock tower in the middle of the mall area Jie, Cheng, Li Qiang, and I had zoomed by last night. Crazy bright scarlet-colored shingles and still-ticking clock hands drew my eye to it instantly. It was the most noticable part of the city easily.

Maylin commented, "China is a wild mix of traditional and modern culture still, just as it was many years ago. The subway transportantion was finished, faster trains were invented like the one you rode into Zhengzhou, and all wild land has mostly been settled, as in Europe. Zhengzhou in the past had three million people and took up 3,332 square miles of land. Now it has two billion people and is the size of America's Lake Erie."

A sudden scream that I could hear through the closed window of the taxi filled the air. A funny moving carpet of brown rodents scurried past us while we were going twenty miles an hour and then the true panic started.