Since getting knocked up, I’ve become a bit of a recluse. Okay, more than a bit. I think I’m presently competing with goth teenagers for the title of “most anti-social.” So when I told Christian that there were a bunch of foreign women meeting at our local Starbucks on Tuesday mornings, he was likely ready to hire some large men to show at our apartment, tie me up, and drag me to the gathering. Happily, I managed to finally take some initiative myself without the assistance.
I arrived at Starbucks yesterday, bag full of beginning German textbooks and a laptop, with my fingers crossed that the rumored coffee was fiction. However, a large group of feminine non-Chinese faces, all congregated in a corner suggested the contrary. I immediately did what any painfully shy twelve year old might due. I walked right past them and went to order my “usual” (a grande Earl Grey tea and a fruit cup–I don’t even have to tell the baristas anymore, which is probably a sign that I’m a boring person who’s spent too much time at Starbucks). Alas for me, there were more of these foreign women in line. What’s more, they were very nice, and upon seeing my non-Chinese feminine face, assumed rightly that I was there for the same reason they were. Busted.
With my tail between my legs, and armed with a gigantic tray of tea and fruit, I sucked up my pride, and waddled over to make my introductions to the bulk of the group. Everyone was warm and friendly, sort of like how I’ve always imagined sororities to be except without the primping, binge-drinking, and eating disorders.
The group was divided into little sub-cliques, generally segregated by language. The non-German wives of Germans all sat together speaking English, the Austrian wives had their Austro-German huddle, and the French women (who weren’t introduced as being married to anyone but probably were) had their own little tete-a-tete. Everyone was mildly curious about me until it came out that a) I’m American and b) I’ve lived in China for two years (apparently this made me a little creepy as no one had apparently seen me before). My relative youth probably didn’t work in my favor either, I’m pretty sure everyone else present was at least thirty, a great many of them had been doing the expat thing in multiple countries for years and years, and they all spoke a multitude of languages (though ironically Chinese wasn’t among them).
Faced with a potentially awkward conversation, I did what only I could possibly do in this situation, I poured sugar into the tea of the French woman next to me and knocked over the table on which most of the full cups were located. It was a masterpiece among clumsy moments, for I soon found myself not only invited back the following week but invited to lunch at Eddie’s (the newest and thus hippest restaurant in the neighborhood that I’d been trying to locate for weeks) immediately afterward.