I was at the Coffee Bean last night, for my somewhat daily ritual. I got my overly priced cup of ‘The Daily Brew’, which the Coffee Bean employees can never understand. I always like to play a game with them, since I go to this place so often. I know most of them recognize me, so what I do is sometimes I speak 100% English and sometimes I speak 100% Chinese. The conversation is simple enough when you are ordering a cup of coffee that I can speak in only Chinese and still present myself as someone who actually speaks fluent Chinese. So when I speak only English to them, usually they have a hard time understanding me when I ask for a large Today’s Brew. It must be the word Brew that throws them off but they just don’t get what that is. And they always ask me the same questions, every time. “Do I want cream? Would I like some cake with that?” The cake looks good but I just can’t budge myself to spend the $3 for a single slice. And they know I never order the cake, I don’t understand why they continue to ask me. It must be company policy or something.

Yesterday evening, I was doing some relaxed programming, as I like to call it on my Macbook, when another fellow struck up a conversation with me. He was from Sweden, works for Volvo here in Shanghai for a 3 month internship and as it turned out, was quite the golfer, a two handicap back in the day. It was kind of funny how the whole conversation went from topic to topic. Similar to myself every so often, there comes a time when you really are in dire need to have a conversation with someone if you are in an environment where you are unable to communicate. I think communication is a really essential part of our daily existence and every so often, you need to have conversation. Even in English, I find myself wanting to have a smooth native conversation every couple weeks with some other native English speaker because it kind of relaxes me, makes me feel normal again and its just a nice feeling to not have to think about what I’ve described before as my ‘dummy English’. Anyway, this guy was obviously in that boat. His company only had one other employee that was from Switzerland, his apartment was not really in a foreign populated area and he just wanted to have a good conversation with someone.

So I obliged and as it turned out, he was a pretty interesting character. We spoke for most of the time I was in the Coffee Bean, something like 3 hours! It was interesting to me to think about how two total strangers could out of the blue start talking to each other for hours upon hours. We would go from one random topic to another. From cars, to China efficiency to culture shock and experiences living in a foreign land to the falling American dollar to American politics and Obama. At one point, about two hours in, the conversation was starting to slow. I mean, there are only so many things I can talk about with a total stranger who I really know nothing about (and at that point, I did not even know his name). Then, somehow golf was mentioned and we discovered we both had a passion for golf, which the became fodder for the next and last hour of our conversation.

All in all, it was a nice conversation with a friendly stranger and something I’m sure most of the people who know me would not imagine me doing. Talking to a stranger for 3 hours that is…