Chinese Drive-In

Taking a stroll around campus tonight I was intrigued by the sounds of what seemed to be a movie trailing off into the humid emptiness between the balding mountains surrounding our school. I approached a square and indeed saw a large screen stretched between two poles and a projector on a school desk shimmering away with a Hong Kong gangster flick. Scattered in front of the screen, against the backdrop of the languorously dark and voluptuously wet subtropical night, were the silhouettes of riders on the bikes, casting amorphic shadows in the flickering light of that makeshift drive-in Chinese way. The teenaged students jauntily straddling a-bike reminded vaguely of the long-gone images of the US drive-ins, eating take-away food and sharing comments; some girls were stretching their barely clad - for the weather - legs near their iron wheeled horses, who in turn kept their peace and did not even give out a neigh as they usually do in that unoiled metallic screeching voice of theirs when the riders are not paying attention.

It's a nice ending of a Saturday night - with a head massage at the barber's on campus, calm half an hour by the lake to the sound of the fish splashing around in the shallow waters, and a walk back home in anticipation of an easy movie with a bottle of Chinese Tsingdao beer and pistachios. Strangely, not very often that I've been noticing those little pleasant moments lately.