Strangers in China
A few years back, I’m in Shanghai on business. Luckily, one of my friends from Malaysia met me there because no one in China speaks English. He was Chinese and wanted to show me around. We’re bored, so we’re drinking and smoking cigars. Trying to act tougher than we really are. And I’m traveling on an expense account so I come up with a brilliant idea.
Let’s invite some random strangers to dinner and get to know them. So we have a few more drinks to build up some courage and start to look for foreigners we can hang out with. We see a couple approach and I stand up:
“umm…sooo….I’ll buy you two dinner. We just want to hang out and get to know some strangers.”
They look understandably skeptical and reply, “well, ummm….maybe…but we have four other people with us.”
“Well, it’s not my money. They can come to.”
So, off we go with six strangers and have dinner in Shanghai. We end up finding out the six people are from all over the world and two weeks prior didn’t know each other. They’re all there on some kind of college exchange program.
We all get along famously.
We decide to go out for drinks after dinner. And, after drinks we decide to go out for more drinks. We find out about the most happening club but hear you need a password to get in.
We don’t have the password.
We send the cutest girl with us to butter up the bouncer. It works. We’re in.
We drink all kinds of drinks. Every round is on me. Well, my expense card anyways.
I wake up the next morning and I’m as sick as can be. I’m in China for one meeting that is supposed to take place on that particular morning. My company flew me all the way here for this one meeting. Then I find out that it’s a very big deal to the people I’m meeting to get to meet me. Fucking China.
There’s no way I’m making the meeting.
I blame it on food poisoning.
I left China the next day headed for Singapore. I horribly disrepsected the business people I was supposed to meet, got sicker than I’ve ever been, and wasted thousands of dollars of my company’s money.
And, most importantly, had the time of my life.
