Love in the amusement park is no roller-coaster ride with kids
I recently was asked by a dear friend to babysit her daughter and niece for the day. So, having no experience in child rearing, I decided to think like a 13-year-old. What would I want to do at that “What do you know?!” age?
After suggesting we spend the afternoon watching (rewatching, in my case) Battlestar Gallactica and being met with the obligatory eyeroll, and then finding out they weren’t pool hall fans, I decided to spend a couple hundred bucks! and take them to Happy Valley.
No, we didn’t go bet on the ponies in Wan Chai in Hong Kong and sip mint juleps. They are not big drinkers, I learned from their mom at the dropoff point.
This Happy Valley is in Beijing, and it’s like a rich man’s Disney.
The reason I say that is because admission was nearly 300 yuan ($44) a head, or almost a “large” for the three of us — comparable to prices at Orlando Disneyland, despite US average incomes being much higher than here.
“How can all these people afford these admission prices?” I asked myself while holding teen-bling in a twohour-long roller-coaster line under a cruel sun at a crowded amusement park.
I wasn’t amused.
To make the best of the situation, I told my two new friends to walk around and take mental notes. Observe your compatriots and tell me how people are interacting — and when you return I’ll hopefully be in sight of the actual roller-coaster cars.
I told them I’d weave their observations into my article, which would soon appear on page 22 of China’s largest English-language newspaper, which won me some instant street cred.
Earlier at the ticket gate, one of them was “just” over the height limit for a halfprice ticket. Maddening! And I also tried to get in for free as a “Service Human” because I told the smiling ticket-taker that I had NO intention of riding rides, and was merely a day chaperone assigned to hold cellphones and sunglasses while the braver members of our three-strong entourage rode upside-down at speeds probably faster than my billiard breaks on roller coasters with names like Cloudsplitter, Hell’s Hangover, Komodo Kommander and the like.
That last one got me to thinking about Commodus (177-192) — the infamous sixth emperor of Rome.
Which of course led me to the story of another Roman emperor not blessed with a trove of outward charms — who will remain unnamed to protect his surviving ancestors — who liked to dress as a commoner (surrounded by Praetorian Guards in disguise of course) and ask out attractive Romans watching the gladiator matinee.
When the leopard was surgically removing the head of an Ostrogoth slave with its pearly-white maw, the refined woman sitting beside him would be so aghast and distracted with horror that she would unthinkingly agree to meet him for wine under the hanging gardens later that evening.
Apparently it usually worked.
Anyhow, my two young friends came back with their reports, saving me from heatstroke with a Coke, and told me they saw several young kids — they actually called them “young kids” — throwing hissy fits because their parents refused to take them on the roller coaster due to long lines, or on another stroke-causing unattractive aerial revulsion-inducing attraction.
The other said, “Oh yeah, I saw a guy say to the girl beside him ‘I love you’, and she reciprocated, just before the ride shot heavenward and everyone started screaming,” again, likely faster than my cue breakspeed.
Then the other one said: “And I saw a couple snuggling on a spinning tea cup ...” which I thought might be a way to keep from being tossed out like a lifeless lemon slice rather than anything romantic.
They also said that couples on the merry-go-round couldn’t fit on the same horse, so they would sit on adjacent steeds, hand-in-hand.
Anyhow, perhaps the riders my friends observed were taking a page from old Commodus’ playbook.
Then, as we were leaving, they said they wanted to buy red couplets to leave wishes on a tree, so out with the WeChat Pay ... AGAIN ...
They both wished for health for their friends and family, as well as success in school — probably the same things Roman kids in the first century wished for, albeit in Latin.