Meeting new people

Keen to meet new people? Find out the basics about a stranger and start chatting. Works well in China.

I still haven’t got rid of my cold (I know, I know, this must be some kind of record. We are talking about one month!), or well, I thought I had until I started to cough again after 6 days of non-coughing. Yup, just as I thought: too good to be true.

Anyways, during my 6-cough-free-days I paid a must needed visit to the gym. (Gosh, I miss working out. When you can’t do it you just want to do it all the time). I did one hour of cardio followed by some stretching before I went to the ladies changing room to change. Suddenly I heard:

-You Na! Oh, wow! Long time no seen! Where have you been?

I turned around to be greeted with a Chinese girl in a gym shirt. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen her before.

-I haven’t seen you here for weeks! Have you been sick?

-Eh… yes, sick. Yes. The flu.

-Ah that’s no good… so how is your Chinese coming along?

-Eh, my Chinese… well…

And so it went on. Turns out, this girl knew quite a lot about me. Too much, if you ask me. Especially since I cannot remember ever talking to her before.

-So how about next year, are you going to look for a journalism job then?

(She knows I have journalism experience?)

-How about your boyfriend then, is he going to stay with his company?

(She knows where my boyfriend works?)

-Yeah must be annoying for you to be sick since you love running!

(She knows that I love running?!)


It was one of those really odd conversations. She was simply being too friendly for me to go:

“Eh, excuse me, who ARE you? And how do we know each other?” Instead I just played along, answered her questions and had a quite nice chat.

-See you next time! She called when I left.

I guess if nothing else, I’ve made a new friend.