What’s Nice about Shanghai? （英文练习）

Let me tell you this way. It’s spring. It’s the first spring you’ve spent in this Southern city. It’s in downtown and it’s in the French Concession. It’s a spring night. It’s a night after a movie, a movie shown at the Cathay Theatre at Huaihai Zhong Lu and Maoming Nan Lu, a few blocks away from your small apartment on Julu Lu. It’s the air. The air feels so fresh and warm when you walk out the theater and the city looks very different now. The streets are clean and cozy and well lighted and the pedestrians are mostly couples just like you and your wife. And your wife looks beautiful and she tells you how the streets at this moment look exactly like a movie set and you feel the same way and suddenly the night feels so nice.

So you walk home. You walk down Maoming Nan Lu and you make a left turn on Changle Lu. Changle Lu is clean and empty and looks like a movie set at this moment and you see nice little shops that have closed for the night and you see a woman driving a tricycle coming this way. You see the cart of the tricycle is loaded with stuffed animals almost as tall as people and you see bears and monkeys and pandas standing side by side traveling slowly under the street lights. You stop walking and you stand there watching and now the night not only looks like a movie but almost looks like a dream. The women who’s been driving the tricycle sees you two and she stops the tricycle. Right in the middle of Changle Lu, separated by a few cars and taxicabs passing by, that woman waves to you and you smile back and she quickly unloads a lovely bear from her vehicle and she holds that big bear in the air and she waves the bear to you and she almost does some little dance.

In the dream version of this story you and your wife brought home a really big bear but in reality you didn’t. You just stand there watching a big bear dancing in the middle of Changle Lu in a warm spring night and you think: That’s what’s nice about Shanghai.