Guest Column: Foreigners Are Weird

Hi Everyone! My name is 林佩君. I am the owner of a small shoe outlet in Taipei City. Our business model is getting display shoes and factory seconds and selling them at 80% off. We never have the same brands for long, because Taiwanese shoppers love a deal, HaHa! I have a strange story to tell you about today. A Foreigner came into our shop today and was an unusual and creepy guy. He was very interested in the brand called District of Columbia, so I asked him if he needed any help. He said no, and when I realized he could speak Chinese, I asked him about the postmodern interpretation of applied socioenconomic linguistic theory as it manifests in the comparative folk literature of Peru and the Andaman Islands. I think he was stupid, because he just stuttered a little bit about skateboards and shoes and how much the D.C.'s cost, so I told him again that they are $300/pair. He looked happy, so I asked him if he thought that differential equations in a bathybenthic supercooled thermonuclear hadron detector could possibly make accurate predictions about the state of social network nodes through machine learning in a post-Trump political landscape. He just kept looking at me like an idiot. I can't understand why he is stupid, he said thank you in Chinese, so I know it isn't a language barrier. I probably should have repeated it faster and louder. Good thing I didn't, it saved him some face.

Not that he had much face to lose. He wasn't wearing socks, but he kept trying on various shoes barefoot, like a disgusting, shameless orangutang. He started piling up the shoeboxes, until I couldn't believe it. He tried on shoes like a total weird guy for about an hour, and ended up with a stack of 12 pairs of Dist. of Co. shoes. What a weird guy! I couldn't believe anyone would buy these slightly discoloured but otherwise perfect skate shoes for $10USD a pair. Just because they are promodels from two years ago doesn't mean that they are worth anything at all, since noone who buys them here actually skates anyway and now skateshoes are out of fashion. I tried to bring up the subject of the Shackelton Expedition's trials in the context of the colonization of Mars and the terraforming of near Solar Intersetllar Objects and what sort of Ruby coding would need to be written for SAS analysis of electromagnetic remote mining drones, but he just kept asking "price is what? uh, final price is how? uhhh, how much final price is?" I had no idea what this fool was trying to say, so I wrote out the total and he gave me some money and then left.

The absolute weirdest part is the exact same thing happened a few hours later. At first I thought it was the same Foreigner, but this one had socks and couldn't say any words at all. I didn't even try to talk to him about the interplay between Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and punk rock as it effected Vanuatu cargo cults and the stability of the Deutschmark. I could tell he couldn't handled it. But he did handle another dozen pairs of $10USD skateshoes, and then kept taking selfies with them and sending them to his weird foreign friends on the Line. I will never understand these people.