Ni hao!In this blog post I will try to show you a litle bit more about general advice during your stay in Beijing! First you have to understand that everybody is very nice, curious of us westerners(Lao Wei) and friendly. Most of the times when somebody seeks contact with you, they want to take your picture or talk to you so they can practise their english and learn more english from you! The chinese, specially the younger ones, are very interested in you as you are a westerner. You both look and behave different to them, and you really have to understand this as they come on to you all the time. Need a break from this, don´t come to China! My advice is take your time with them, talk to them, let them take a picture together with you in their mobile phone! You will make new
friends and learn a lot about how the chinese people are! I will tell you about some examples of this, but firstly I want to tell you about the bad side also. It never happened to me during one months stay, but must have happened to others as I have heard about it. As a man you may be contacted by young female students that wants to sell sex or make you go to very exspensive restaurants with them. This is what I have heard from others. but as I said it never happened to me. Maybe I was in the wrong places or what ever. Just a warning as everybody wants your money. The same when you buy something, don´t buy at their price. Always negociate and you will get a much lower price! Now I will tell you about one day when I was sitting down on a chair in a hutong street next to a bank. Now the bank on the picture here is not this one. In every bank I visited you have two guards. Liping was cueing at the bank, and during that time a guard came up to me and asked if I speak english. He sat down next to me, and he could all the time see the bank, and we started talking. We talked for 30 minutes about almost everything. 
His country, my country, how would I find t-shirts with chinese text(I only see with english text as it´s very popular in Beijing), and most interestingly we talked about world environment questions. His english was very good. A very nice young man with, I think, a very good future ahead as he was very clever too! Another time I was contacted near our home by a very nice young woman. Maybe she was some 30 something years old. We talked for also something like 30 minutes about most things in the world, though not about environment issues. I understood that she wanted to improve her english with my help. I met her two times later during my stay during my walks in the Nan Guan Park, and then we only said hello to each other. My advice is always be open to talk to the chinese interested in you, because they always are that! You will make many new friends in this wonderful country. Zai jian!
Peter
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