giggling chinese waitresses and bearded ladies
My Dad lives in Hong Kong, and when I was 16 I went to visit him. We went for a week long trip into China, well away from the beaten track.

Now at the time, I was going through my ultra-hippie phase, and wore bright guatemalan material trousers, loud indonesian print shirts, huge hair and a wispy goatee. I thought I looked amazing. I really didn't.

In one town we stayed in a hotel which was special in it's own way - a telephone from about 1920 in our room, hand sized spiders in the bathroom, etc. But my story is about when we went for a meal in the restaurant downstairs.

We made our way to the table and sat down. People stared at us quite openly, but we were getting used to that - we were the first white people a lot of them had seen, and when we were walking around the town it wasn't unusual for crowds to gather to stare at us, shouting "hello" and "cocacola" and other english words (none of them rude funnily enough).

The waitress came and gave us our menus, tittering slightly. Then we saw her peering around a pillar at us with another waitress, both giggling. Eventually, a gaggle of about 5 or 6 waitresses appeared, pointed at us and burst out laughing!

Eventually she came over to our table and asked my Dad's wife (who is chinese) something, pointing at me, which made her burst out laughing too. When she'd gone away with our orders she told me what she'd asked. It was "is that a woman with a beard or a man with long hair?"
(teasus likes tea, Fri 18 Jan 2008, 17:33, Reply)