There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch...

... Unless of course you are a foreigner living in China. Yessiree, I have tapped into something quite special. Living in Ningbo has a lot of advantages. Sure, its not the glamorous Shanghai or the bustling Beijing but it has its charm. One, the air is super clean here and if you have ever lived in a developing countries' city which uses coal as its source of electricity than you know what I'm talking about! Two, the people. They are generally very friendly and curious of foreigners. Of course this city is developing fast (quite literally right in front of my eyes) and there are more foreigners every month but we are still a curiosity to them. For the most part if there is a foreigner here than he (usually he) is here for business and business only. Therefore they speak little to no Chinese at all. This fact makes my curiosity factor jump ten fold.
So, the other day i was with my colleague Bree and we was a gettin hungry. Tired of the same old things she suggested some awesome street food that she had had the other day. This sandwich had the meat cooked just like a Gyro. Then it is diced finely and mixed with finely diced cucumber, spicy chili sauce, and stuffed into a thick type of pita bread. Its absolute greasy goodness and a bargain at 5 kuai a sandwich (just over 65 cents).
While the guy is making the sandwich he strikes up conversation. In a limited capacity its exciting that i can actually do this now... in Mandarin. We talk a bit about the east and the west, the differences between Chinese and Western culture, Chinese money and American money, how i like it here, and what i think of Chinese people. Now talking about all this might sound sophisticated but you have to remember that almost every Chinese person is curious about this and thus i get asked these same exact questions quite often. So i have a lot of practice with these topics.
Anywho, we finish talking and he hands me my sandwich. When i go to hand him the money for it he pushes it away insisting that it was his treat! How cool is that!? It was so nice to be able to speak to a foreigner about a foreigner's perspective in his own language that he felt that he should give me the sandwich for free! My colleague was also astonished. See? Speaking Mandarin really does open a lot of doors. And a free lunch is just the beginning for yours truly.