the garrison show

who’s the celebrity, you may wonder?? me!

this has got the be the greatest thing about china…i’m just walking down the street and all of a sudden i feel a tug on my sleeve. lo and behold, it’s a chinese girl (or three) waiting to take a picture with me! it does wonder for the self-esteem.

an example: i’m walking down the street with my new friend chaolin and we’re looking for the beach. we end up asking a couple of girls for directions (now, i say ‘we’ but i really mean ‘he,’ in chinese) and they point out the way. we’re off down the sidewalk when 10 seconds later they call out - can they take a picture with me? of course they can!! so we take some photos then they ask if they can walk us to the beach. surprisingly, i can’t think of a good reason why not! so we get to the beach and they’re practicing their english and one of them whips out a violin! no shit! so we sit on the sand by the water and listen to the waves and the girls plays the violin as the sun sets peacefully. ridiculous.

you might assume that my appeal would be limited to the younger female crowd, but you’d be wrong. xiamen has a island, gulanyu, which i visited with a couple other backpackers. there were three of us, myself, a bloke from jersey and a cute girl from princeton. you might assume, that if a group of businessmen stopped us to take a picture with us, they might be interested in the princeton girl (as i was!). imagine our collective surprise when they line up to take individual snapshots with me!

if i wasn’t in beijing and already at least two posts behind, i’d tell you more stories and end with a funny joke.