Being ignored - and enjoying it...

So it happens that I "must" start with summarizing the "entry I never wrote": Traveling in Malaysian Borneo and later in the Philippines I (and every other person with non-Asian appearance) receives a lot of attention.

In Malaysia the most common types that happened to me on the streets are:

• "Hello my friend" - followed by a "where are you from?"

or

• "Welcome to Malaysia"

The Malaysian (at least the ones in Borneo) seem to be just curious about the foreigners walking around their streets. These short conversations happen very frequently, sometimes as often as every 5 minutes... Though, it's nice it's sometimes getting a bit too much.

A follow-up to an entry I never wrote

In the Philippines the most common expressions were:

• "Hello my friend" - followed by a lot of words trying to convince me to buy his stuff as soon as a showed the little most attention - and even if I ignored them completely. After a while I learned to say "No" in a very convincing (rude) way which mostly helped after having repeated it 3 times in increasing tones...
• "Hello" followed by gesture to the (sometimes useful, sometimes completely useless - in my opinion) products he or she was selling
• "Tuu-Tuuut" by the taxis. Every empty taxi that passed by on the streets had to toot - and there are normally a lot of those around! I even thought about coulouring my hair black so I would look more like a local - at least from the back...

Most of the times I didn't like the attention that was paid to me here - though sometimes there were also people just interested like the Malaysians.

And here comes the actual entry :-) : So for 2 month I received a lot of attention as soon as I was in a street. Arriving in Hong Kong nobody looked at me, nobody ever started talking to me, no saying "Hello" - just nothing. It felt a bit strange the first hours but finally it was also a relief to have the freedom to do whatever I wanted, going wherever my map lead me, just have a rest on a bench or having a bite in a restaurant while nobody cared at all. Complete ignorance and I enjoyed it :-)