The Chinese Guts

When I walk down the street, people turn. When I sit in the park, people stare. What is she doing here, they're wondering. What is a westerner doing in our city? In Sweden, this would never become more than a thought. People would never actually ask the stranger they're wondering something about. Here it's different. People ask. People are curious and want to know the answer. They are not only curious of what I'm doing here but too of who I am. They want to talk to me. To someone different. 

Today it's Saturday and it's my day off. No work. I decided to buy myself an ice coffee and enjoy it in one of Tianjin's beautiful parks while I listened to my favorite podcast named "Alex & Sigge's podcast". After a few minutes a girl, only 8 or 9 years old, comes up to me and starts talking. She just wants to say hello. Her English is very limited but she's not scared. We talk for a few minutes before she runs back to her mom. A while later, a woman of age 76 comes up to me. She asks if she can sit down next to me. I say "of course". She tells me that she has just started to take English classes once a week and that she would like to practice her conversational skills. We talk for about half an hour, she's extremely interesting and funny and even though she's far from a fluent English speaker she had the guts to come up to me which resulted in an amazing meeting between two very different people. 

If I had just started to take Chinese lessons and I saw someone Chinese sitting in a park back home, I doubt that I'd go up to that person to practice this, to me, new language. I wish I had the fearlessness and fortitude of the people here. 
Playing cool with one of my students 😚

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