Cupid’s arrow strikes hearts in Shanghai
I see this Chinese girl calling my name and looking at me. So, I said “hi” and she asked, “Do you remember me?” I said, “Of course,” but actually I didn’t.
So, she told me she remembered me from when I was doing French classes in France, and she told me she was a really good friend of one of my classmates.
Why is this story interesting? Because it reveals how small the world really is! To go from a country to a city which has over 24 million people. It goes to show how small it can be at times.
Maxim: I like that sometimes Chinese people are more interested in other cultures and countries. I appreciate that. I like to learn about other cultures and I like history, so for me, when I meet someone from a different culture, I always tend to ask something about where they come from.
Maxim: What I don’t like about Shanghai is the pollution, but after living here for a year, it’s not the worst part of it. The city is quite densely populated, and since it develops so quickly economically, people tend to be very much in their own world, and they don’t really notice other people around them. I wouldn’t say they are aggressive, but maybe a bit inconsiderate. China needs to work a bit more on developing a civil society in the culture. the grass and sit on the benches, if you want to enjoy nature. But in some Shanghai parks you can’t stay on the grass and some areas are restricted.
Angie: One day my friends and I met an Italian guy and his friends on the Metro. He told me he was doing some research for his PhD degree on a village where a lot of Chinese immigrants from Italy had settled. We instantly became friends and decided to go to this village he was researching.
We found that they all spoke Italian in the village and there were many Italian products there. It was a very small place in Zhejiang, maybe in Wenzhou.
Maxim: I went with Angie to Sanya. On the second or third day, we met a
(an owner of a barbecue store). He just started talking with Angie and said she speaks good Chinese.
Then he was looking for somebody to translate his menu into Russian, so I kindly agreed. It wasn’t a difficult job, but we helped him and did a bit extra on top, just to make it look nice and more adaptable toward people speaking Russian.
He gave me the name of the dish and I would translate it into something understandable for Russian people. I had no idea what was in the dish, although I’d want to know what’s inside, but we never went that far.
The next day he invited us for dinner. He brought us a lot of food and wine. This continued for a few days but, interestingly, he never joined us.
We wanted to have a drink and dinner together, so finally on the day we were leaving he joined us. After we finished a bottle of wine, he brought over six or seven bottles of beer. We were drinking and toasting each other, (cheers), and in the end got quite drunk.
It’s not a life-changing story but what is interesting is that some people speak Russian in Sanya! He and I couldn’t speak together, yet we could still kind of understand each other.