Chapter 6: weird stories from the road

Small collection of funny and strange stories collected so far from hanging out with this amazing and entertaining group of my newly founded travelling friends... Some days we laugh so hard bellies hurt days afterwards :-)

1) Chocolate happy spot: a Canadian guy travelling with me told this super funny story from his life. Every time someone on the truck is eating chocolate now it causes uncontrollable laughter attacks! Here it goes: this Canadian is a great chocolate lover and developed a special technique of eating chocolate, which evidently (at least to him) maximizes the pleasure: he puts a piece of chocolate in a spot in the back and on the top of his mouth. He calls is his "chocolate happy spot". Few years ago he was having dinner with his parents, his wife and his in-laws (whom he was meeting for the first time). After dinner, instead of desert, he handed everyone a piece of chocolate and said "and now put this in your happy spot". I can only imagine the purplexed expressions of their faces while they were trying to figure out what on earth they're supposed to do with this chocolate now!!!

2) Bananas: an English guy on the truck told this hillarious story, memory of which evidently still lights up the meetings in his office back in London. Sometime ago in some seriously dull business meeting he was trying to lighten up the discussion with some meaningless chitchat. He wanted to say that if he puts a banana in his desk drawer at work overnight, the banana turns black. What came out of his month instead was "if you put your banana in a dark place, it turns black" :-)))

3) It's mine: it's more a game than a story. Everyone on the truck (including the crew) is currently playing the game, which dictates that every time anyone says the phrase "it's mine", they have to drop to the floor - no matter where we currently are - and do 10 push-ups. We've had people (including your beloved friend, the author of these words) doing push-ups in all kinds of weird places all over China to the utter amuzement of the locals: floor in restaurant, dirty ground in city centres or petrol station parking lots, truck floor, hotel lobbies etc etc etc. I did mine (twice in one day!) in the Inner Mongolian grasslands in the rain.

Now you're probably thinking myself and my fellow travellers are a bunch of sorry childish people with nothing better to amuze ourselves but to play silly games and tell stupid stories but believe me, it is immense fun! Plus we have to entertain ourselves somehow on those long drive days through industrial China!