A foreigner in a strange land

It's interesting, that being so obviously not from around here that it makes the locals so curious. Even in relatively touristy areas, such as around the edges of West Lake in Hangzhou I was still being looked at. Over the last few weeks I've had plenty of people calling out 'helloooo', usually from a distance or from behind me. Most of the time it's OK but sometimes it can be annoying or there is a hint of negativeness in it...
Walking around Suzhou, which is meant to be a touristy town, I had lots of people looking at me. Well, actually I was wearing shorts and they were all looking at my legs. I think I saw only one local in shorts in the two or so days I was there (and maybe a handful of girls in skirts).
But overall I have had a pretty good experience. Even though China is opening up and tourism has been here for quite a while people are still curious about foreigners. It is not unusual for people to come up to you and ask to have their picture taken with you.
Sometimes someone will start a brief conversation with you so they can practice a bit of English. Sometimes they will want to talk to you but they don't speak English and I get to practice the little bit of Chinese I know.
A couple of days ago, wandering through a park in Hanzhou I walked past three Chinese people. To me they looked like two young girls (on a young teen) and a little boy. They asked to have their picture taken with me. Sure. As I was walking back, I met them in a different place and one of them invited me to sit with them. We chatted a bit in Chinese.
[An aside. My Chinese is very limited, so the success of a conversation will often come down to the Chinese person words their questions. If they ask me something that is a bit different from the text book conversations I probably understand even though I might have been able to give an answer. They then might just give up. If they ask their questions in the right way then I can answer and we can have a little conversation.]
It tuned out that the girl (not the teen) was actually the mother of the little boy. After a bit of age guessing we were both surprised to find that we were both 29. She had gotten married at 21 or 22 and had the boy at 22.
In Fuzhou I had to stay two nights in a hotel. The first evening I went wandering to find some drink and went to one of the nearby little hole-in-the-wall shops that sold drinks and fruit and snack foods and thermos flasks and cleaning products etc. Working there was Henry, a happy smiley welcoming young man who welcomed me to his shop (well, of course, so I could buy things). His English was really good and I found that he had studied something to do with computers and was working here in his family shop in the evenings. Last night I needed some water so I wandered over to his shop to see if he was there. He was and he invited me to sit (which I think is fairly Chinese). We chatted for a while and he told me about his plan to open a restaurant (not quite what we'd expect - it would be a hole-in-the wall type shop selling easy to cook fast food). This is because he thought it would be more likely to make more money this way than to have a regular job. He had already worked for five years installing computers and slowly worked his way up to an OK salary (2000RMB per month). But his cousin owns a couple of these little restaurants and makes 5000RMB per month. We also did the age guessing game. I was surprised to find he was 27 (he looked young even by Chinese standards). Then he was surprised that I wasn't 20...
Someone bought some bananas he gave me one, on him.(Katrina has already busted me for casually mentioning eating bananas. What can I do? I can't help it if I can casually eat bananas here...). I thanked him and mentioned that I was a little hungry. When his brother-in-law relieved him we went out to dinner. I didn't have much of a chance to stop him but dinner was his treat as well. He asked about taxes in Australia, whether they were high. I compared Sweden which has really high taxes and we talked about social services and social security. Well, in China, there is nothing. If you need to go to hospital you pay. If you are old, well you better have saved enough money. If you don't have a job, well, get a job.
This is a very different world...