by ralferoo | 2025-12-14 22:51:39+00:00
I've got lots of travel stories, not of which are as impressive as most of the other stories here, because I was never in a situation where I needed help but I have definitely experienced strangers where I'm a foreigner in their country just randomly deciding they're going to be nice to me. Nothing earth shattering, but definitely things that were the highlight of that particular trip.

The most recent one was walking through an "ancient village" in China, looking around at all the cool houses and poking my head into the obviously shop ones. There was one shop (I think, I never did actually find out!) with a load of traditional instruments that you could see through the open front door and someone playing to the side of the door. I poked my head in, and they stopped playing as they were too embarrassed to play for an audience, but I had a bit of a chat with her in Chinese about the instrument - it was a guqin, and similar concept to the guzheng I'd had a couple of hours of lessons on as part of my language classes back home. (The difference is that guqin is more like a 7 string violin without frets, a guzheng is 21 strings each a different note). About a minute later, a guy popped in and explained that the woman was shy playing in front of others, and when she told him that I'd mentioned the other instrument, he sat down and said "I'll teach you to play!". Which he did for about 10 minutes and then said, "Follow me, pipe, pipe, pipe!" He then took me down a small street and into a different shop that turned out to be a school for bamboo flutes (called xiao), which are like reedless descant recorders, so you have to make the base sound with your lips. Despite knowing the fingering from learning the recorder as a kid, I only managed to produce a note about 20 or 30 times from 100+ attempts, but they were impressed anyway. He sat me down to drink tea, and brought it all the other students and teachers and just had an impromptu tea party. Despite being in a bit of a hurry by then as I needed to catch the bus back to where I was staying before they stopped running about 10pm, I ended up being there for about 3-4 hours. They were probably going to just be hanging around their studio anyway, and the cost of the tea they used was probably a dollar at most, but it was a unique experience for me to see something that probably the other thousand people who visited that day would walk past and didn't even know existed! Plus I got to practice my language skills in a completely different way than I'd done before.

One act of kindness from me in my early 20s, when I had a year travelling around Australia, was offering to buy a meal for a homeless guy begging outside McDonalds. It seemed such a simple thing, but it was clearly very transformative for him. Obviously, he would get some money each day from people throwing coins into his hat, but he said that about 90% of people walked past him and completely ignored him, and even the people that donated usually didn't even make eye contact. He told me it was the first real conversation he'd had with someone for about 5 years and for just a few dollars and 10 minutes of my time, I was able to make him feel that someone did actually see him as a real human being with his own story to tell. It definitely shaped me as a person too, because I saw how something so simple and easy for me made such a big difference to him.