Several days ago, William was having a bad day. He said "Nothing seems to be going well for me today. Its just been an awful day." He was telling us this as we were walking to dinner across the street. Little did any of us know at that time, but it was about to get worse. In previous blogs, I may have described the craziness that is the traffic in this city: cabs, bicycles, cars, trucks, motorcycles, pedestrians and buses all trying to use the same street. there are no rules. no lines. no traffic lights. no stop sights. just chaos. On this day, the traffic was no lighter than normal as we attempted our everyday death-walk across the street outside of south-gate. "stop, look and listen" is a bit of an understatement when it comes to crossing the street in this country. "Duck, dodge and dive" is probably a better description of what needs to happen. Anyway, as we were crossing the street, a small woman on an e-bike swerved to avoid hitting me (a good choice, who do you think would have been more damaged by that?) and instead clipped William's leg. He cussed and limped off the road and we proceeded to dinner where all of our food arrived on time. All except William's.
During dinner, (short) Ben said to me "Hey, haven't you been wanting to go check out that lottery place down the street?" I said "Yup!" Will chimed in "I'll go too, my luck can't get any worse!" so we walked a block down the street and found two small shops that Ben informed us were "for the lottery" one was the "sports lottery" and the other was the "welfare lottery" (named after where the revenue goes). Ben said that we should support sports, and I said "Yeah, why not."
This was definitely an experience worth describing. As we approached the slitted sheet of plastic, that often serves as a door here, a man, not able to see out, opens the slit and spits a great loogie on the ground in front of us. This might have made the fainthearted turn around, but we were determined to go inside and buy some scratch off tickets. Upon entering we were immediately greeted by an older gentleman who said "Good evening, how may I help you?" in perfect unaccented English. This of course shocked us, and we later found out that he had been a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan some years back. This was quite unexpected. We bought our tickets. Ben and I each bought a 5 Yuan scratcher (about 80 cents) and William took my advice and bought a strip of Five 2 Yuan scratchers. Ben scratched first and won 20 yuan! I went next and lost... But then William scratched his 5 tickets and the one in the middle was an 80 yuan winner! his luck had finally changed! Although I had lost, we were all quite pleased. We walked into the lotto-shop and spent 20 Yuan (less than 3 USD) and come out with 100 (closer to 20 USD)! what a great time.
On the way home we joked that William should have more bad days so that we could play the lottery more often. I even went as far as to volunteer to run over him with my own bike.
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