conversation piece

I've had interesting encounters with chatty people lately. I got a taxi driver the other night whose Chinese/English accent was so strong I could barely understand what he was saying, but when I did decipher it, turned out he was telling me all about why modern motorbikes are rubbish. "If you give one away, I still not take it!" I don't know if I looked like someone who would know or care what he was talking about, but he certainly was passionate about it. A bike passed us in traffic and he chortled, "Sound like angree mosseee!"

Today I went into the city and got my hair cut, and the hairdresser similarly decided to tell me all about all sorts of things that I hadn't really professed an interest in, from her boyfriend winning Lotto (she wasn't sure if he was telling the truth when he said he'd won $24 million), to the change in her bra cup size. She kept telling me, at every stage of the process, that my haircut was going to look 'hot'; after the tenth time she said this, my polite smile was starting to fade, but I realised she did have a mild sense of humour when she teased the hair over my face and went "See? HOTTTTT." She was also one of those 20-year-old who talks about their life as though they've been around for aeons ("I've been doing this since I was 14...I'm 20 now, so, yeah, like forever."). Still, she was kind of amusing, and I like my haircut.