Conversations with Strangers - Top 10
When travelling, you get to meet lots of new people and have lots of conversations with strangers. After a while you start realize that many conversations are very similar to each other… for some reason, this is especially true for conversations with Chinese guys (girls tend to be a bit more creative).
A typical conversation would invariably begin with a “ha-lo!“, which might be thought of an attempt in English. Once in a while a brave Chinese, vaguely recalling his highschool English studies, follows up with an English “where are you from?”. At this point they get really stuck, because Chinese pronounce country names differently than the way we pronounce them in the west so there is no way in hell they can understand my answer of “Israel”, and we must switch to Chinese. The next part of the conversation is also quite easy to anticipate, and all of it can be summed up by this “Top 10 Conversation Topics List”:
1. Ha-lo!
2. Where are you from?
3. Ah, Israel! Israelis are Muslim right?
4. Oh, Jews! Jews are so clever!
5. The prime minister of Israel is “Shalong”.
6. Israel is currently fighting a war.
7. Let me tell you everything I think about the political situation in the middle east.
8. Do you have a wife/girlfriend?
9. What do you think of Chinese girls?
10. Great! Then I’ll hook you up with a Chinese girl. Here, [randomly pointing at some passing girl], how about this waitress over here?
Regarding #7, you might be interested to hear (especially Gilad Feldman who writes about this sort of stuff in his blog) that although the formal Chinese stand in the Israeli-Palestine dispute is supporting Palestine, it seems that the general population tends to take Israel’s side. One of the opinions voiced to me was that all the problems in the Middle East would be solved if only everyone would simply follow Confucius’s teachings….
fiLi
October 7th, 2006 at 9:38 pm
If only that would be applied to the China-Taiw@n/T@bet relations.
-
Good one.
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Lin
October 7th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
Here goes another story. Ori and Lin visited Confucius Temple in Beijing. They met a nice Chinese man who was working there. After knowing that Ori is from Israel, the nice Chinese started to give us a long lecture: “the middle East problems are very easy to be solved. All you need to do is to learn some Confucius teaching…you can stop the war, just do this and do that….” Lin lost her patience and decided to abandon her dear friend Ori. The man was talking and walking ahead at the same time, Lin slowed down, and stopped at some point, silently said “good bye” to Ori who was walking along with this nice Chinese man, telling Ori the final solution for the middle east conflicts, all was in Chinese! Now I am laughing, and you know why, right?
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Yifat
October 8th, 2006 at 6:15 am
I think that guy has some jewish genes in his genom….
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Ori
October 8th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
It’s not only “that guy”, this is a TYPICAL conversation. Maybe half of the Chinese have jewish genes…. dropped off sixty years ago by the over-enthuasiastic Shanghai jews.
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Yifat
October 8th, 2006 at 10:38 pm
actually I meant the guy from Lyn’s story (I forgot to nest it…sorry) this guy just knows how to fix all the problems in the middle east and no one came up with his solution before… - very Jewish!) but you’re right, setting up people without really thinking about it before, and without asking them is also very Jewish…. and the question is weather they took our genes or we took their… and ma adif?
)
PS- note the nesting this time…;)
PS No. 2 - don’t think we didn’t notice the hidden commercials here under the “clean”, naive look of the page… (just like you
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An NengMin
October 8th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Common people,we all miss the most important one:
So Ori……what do you think about Chinese girls????
What do you think about chinese girl-waitress???
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Ori
October 8th, 2006 at 9:17 pm
After all the “every person is unique and should be judged separately bla bla bla” preamble, I think I can say that Chinese girls are very cute. I just wish they’d ask the supposed “matches” for their opinion before offering them to me…
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David
October 12th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
Meh, free will is overrated.
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David
October 12th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Besides, what cute chinese girl wouldn’t want to be set up with a nice jewish guy? I mean, come on, the writing is on the great wall! (I’ve been saving that one for a good moment.)
Hm, I just thought of something - remember my old “If you ask enough girls out, one is bound to say yes” M.O.? That would world so much better in China. Come to think of it, it apprears that you don’t even need to ask them.
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David
October 12th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
s/world/work/
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shina
October 12th, 2006 at 8:47 am
http://chinese-garden.net/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=26&topic=646.0
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Opher
October 14th, 2006 at 7:18 am
I hate the middle-east-problem discussion. especially when started by girls i hit on…
anyway, in the past year i’ve had my fair share of time out-of-the-country, and you didnt write my personal favorite:
*rolling drums please*
How many camels does your family own?…
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Old Maoz
October 16th, 2006 at 5:27 am
Dear Ori,
We are waiting anxiouly for the next chapter…
Kisses,
Aba
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Ilana
October 24th, 2006 at 5:15 am
Hey Ori !!
I read all your previous blogs and they are realllly cool and interesting!
Thanks a lot and keep writing, that makes me really want to get there by myself!
and anyways, that’s not fair that u’re there and we started school yesterday
!
Your former classmate,
Ilana:)
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