walking backwards

the other day i was walking home in the evening after having dinner with a friend. as i was walking down the big street near my house before turning onto the street where i live, i saw an interesting sight. ahead of me on the sidewalk there were two people walking in the same direction as me, except walking backwards. it seemed like the tiles in straight rows on the sidewalk kept them going in the right direction. for some reason this sight didn't seem entirely strange to me, just a little amusing. i guess i'm getting a better idea of what things would not be strange to see around here, and i even think i came to a pretty accurate conclusion about why they were walking backwards--if they walk backwards, this works different muscles, and is therefore a different type of exercise. and i often see people, especially older people (these two people were), dancing or doing some time of movement exercise on street corners (seriously, there are a few places where groups of people just gather and bring some music and practice their dancing and it's like an excercise/dance session). so it all seemed perfectly reasonable.

so i'm gaining on these two people walking backwards because when you walk backwards, you walk slower than you normally would (you can try it sometime). and then i'm passing them. and as i pass them, they decide to stop walking backwards. the lady starts to walk in step with me, and the man is walking behind us, and the lady starts to try to talk to me in chinese. (another reason i concluded they were excercising is the way she walked even when she was walking forward--it was an exercise-like walk.) she said something to me about eating a meal, but i didn't really know what she meant, so i told her i didn't understand. she said some other things that i actually didn't understand, but she kept trying for a bit. during this time, the man was behind us, and i started to hear him say things like, "hello, thank you, you're welcome, sorry, good-bye"--i think he was thinking of all the english words he knew and just saying them. i had no response to that though since he just kept saying words and none of them really went together. after a couple of minutes, the lady was convinced that i actually didn't understand what she was saying.

so she went back to walking backwards, and since she was now walking slower, i got ahead of them and continued on my way home.