I'm very interested in talking to people who have very different lifestyles from mine - hearing their opinions or just talking about random things - but more often than not i'm too shy, embarrassed or don't know what to say to start a conversation. I'm trying to get better at this and also put myself in more situations where random people will start talking to me.
Today I arrived at the school early and picked a random place off campus to eat breakfast. The Western campus is kind of on the Southwestern outskirts of Beijing; it seems as if it was built on what used to be its own small town, where they are now building expensive high rises. I picked a cheap (1 kuai for 豆浆油条), dirty place, and people who came in almost immediately started talking about me to the store owner (though they didn't think I was Russian, Alex), which makes it much easier to start talking *to* them. The one man I talked to had the common misconception that everyone in the US is rich. He thought there were no beggars there, and mentioned the big gap between rich and poor in China, thinking the US was not the same (China's gini coefficient is higher that American's but not by much). They asked me my monthly salary - something apparently everyone shares in China - and were amazed that I had 3 siblings (America doesn't have a one child policy?).
Conversations with my students are interesting too, both during and after class. As an interesting anecdote, many of my students are quite liberal - most are for gay marriage. Though they still hate the Japanese.
