pantsfarm

Over the Chinese National holiday about a week ago (ended a week ago) I went to visit my sister in India. When I can get my hands on any of the photos from that trip I’ll probably write up a new post here about that trip (delicious!).

The flight I took was on Ethiopian Airlines which runs a route from Beijing to Addis Abeba with a stop in Delhi. On the way back, I was seated next to a group of Chinese dudes from Tangshan.

When I first boarded the plane, I was pretty tired and fell asleep pretty much right away, as I am wont to do during air travel. Later though, when I was awake and eating some chewy chicken thing, the guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation.

In the past I’ve been really unreceptive to striking up random conversations with people because in Beijing the only people I ever encounter who try to strike up random conversation are people trying to sell me something, but during my visit to India I met a lot of people who were really just friendly and wanted to chat.

So anyway, I’m chatting with this guy and he’s trying to figure out what my deal is since I got on in Delhi, am flying to Beijing, and don’t really look that Chinese or Indian. I noticed that on this flight, in contrast with my flight out of China, it’s mostly Chinese (the flight out was much more Indians and Africans) and I asked what they were all doing in Addis Abeba.

He wasn’t sure about most of the people on the plane (and I’m not sure why I assumed he would have any idea) but him and his 3 buddies were all coming back to China from Zambia. Apparently they’d been traveling for something like 17 hours when I got on the plane in Delhi and were closing out 24 hours of continuous travel (final stop was Beijing where they all lived now).

I knew basically nothing about Tangshan and Zambia both (couldn’t locate either on a map either) so I asked these guys about what they were doing and where. First I got that Tangshan was in Hebei, so from this I guessed (correctly) that these guys were working in some heavy industry or mining or something and had been sent out to Zambia since China seems to have invested a lot in lots of African nations lately. That was exactly it, as they all had backgrounds in coal mining and had been sent to Zambia to investigate digging for something else (coal? oil? this got lost in translation a bit). They were coming back at that time because their Visas were up.

It was around this time that our conversation was getting to be too much for our mutual lack of each other’s language, so the guy next to me asked his buddy to switch seats him because the buddy’s English was better. I found out that this was their first ever trip out of China, and that Americans speaking English are much easier to understand than Africans and British and pretty much anybody else. It’s because all the TV and movies that these guys use to practice are American!

He lamented a bit how he wants to get better at English but he has nobody to practice with and not enough time outside of work to do so either. I sympathized though really for him it’s a lot more legitimate considering that I am a foreigner in China learning Chinese while he is not a Chinese dude in America learning English.

About this time the conversation turned as my conversations so often do to basketball. The buddy likes Garnett a lot, and the first guy said he likes the bulls, but also Kobe. The Bulls fan was apparently the best of the four of them, and wanted to know if I was very good at basketball because I am American (so obviously I play basketball all the time!). Compelled by my duty to truth I explained that I am not in fact much of a basketball player.

That’s pretty much all there was to it as by this time we were landing and we exchanged cards and pleasantries out at the luggage carousel and then I headed off.