Last night, Andy and me took our bikes and headed for some foot massage fun. She'd seen a little place not too far from here that we decided to try out. And so, for 28 yuan each, we got a nice footbath/arm massage (!! why does this come with the foot massage??!) / foot massage, all according to Chinese medical tradition.

What made the visit especially fun though, were the people there. A girl who works (and lives) there came to talk to us, and she was soooo excited and happy to have us there. She literally kept bouncing about the place like a Duracell bunny after 10 cups of coffee. But it was a good laugh, she's real nice and made me laugh. In the end, she managed to get a photographer to come over and take a picture of all of us, which they will blow up to quite a big size and probably put on their wall. I'll have to drop by there some time this week to take a look at the picture and have a little chat with her again.

In the past few days, I've met some other nice people too. One is an older woman, Ma Ai Hua, who lives on the first floor in out building. I bumped into her a few days ago and we started talking. She invited me to go over some time to talk some more, and so I did on wednesday night. We talked for a long while, she told me about her life and family and so forth, and I told her about mine. She was also excited to hear that my flatmate Andy comes from Ottawa, as she has relatives living there, so she invited her to come along with me for a dinner, which we are going to do tonight.

The dinner will be dumplings, but as Mrs Ma is not all that healthy, she asked her niece to make them for us. So yesterday, as I was going out, I bumped into these people ringing at Ma Ai Hua's door. They asked me if i knew if she was home, but there was no answer so apparently not. She was carrying two big bags of dumplings so i guessed who it was. She then asked if she could put the food in our freezer instead, and we climbed back up to the 7th floor together. I just think it's great how people here can be so friendly to others who are practically aliens.

A mental sidestep: Chinese bookshops are often more like crowded libraries. Especially on weekends the aisles are full of people sitting around everywhere, reading the books.