Chinese Encounters, Pt. 1
Spending nearly a total of 3 months in China and its various territories, you'd have to be pretty anti-social or otherwise lazy not to (gasp) talk to some locals. Luckily, my misanthropic tendencies were no match for the crushing mass of 1.2 billion locals. What's more, the surprising gregariousness of our Chinese counterpart generation did a lot to foster some interesting conversations. This is not to say that conversations including one or more of the phrases "Lookee, lookee", "Best price for you", or "Laowai! [old foreigner]" aren't interesting in their own right, but on the whole I think I most prefer the ones where I am treated as something other than an exotic walking changepurse.
