Still freaked out by the midget.
Today after brunch, Sherry and Anna and I want to Raffles City, a large shopping center. They got some ice cream in big food court downstairs. While we were sitting there, I noticed everyone around was staring at something. There was a little girl sitting there alone with two bowls of noodles. This middle-aged midget was coming over to the table, and I thought, “Man, everyone is staring at her dad because he’s a midget. That’s so rude.” The guy sat down in the seat across from the girl, and started eating from the bowl of noodles. Sherry commented that the girl looked frightened to her. We looked over, to see that the guy got up all of a sudden, ambled over to another woman’s table (she was reading a book and was none the wiser about what was going on) then sat down across from HER. At this point, about ten people were all looking, trying to figure out what was going on, while the original little girl just sat there, stunned. After sitting there for a minute or so, the man got up and wandered away.
We were all astonished. I’d really never seen anything like that, a stranger just coming over, eating someone else’s food, and then leaving. I told some workers what had happened, and then went over to the girl, who was about twelve, and looked like she didn’t know whether to cry or throw up or what. I asked her if she knew the man, or if he was a stranger. The other ladies nearby who had asked her already told me he was a stranger, and we all told another worker from the food court what had happened. Then finally the girl’s dad came back from wherever he had been, and by that time the people had agreed to get rid of the original noodles and give them a new bowl.
It was really weird. I mentioned it to the taxi driver on the way home, and he said it was actually pretty common for people to do that. I didn’t believe him until I told Dog Man about it, and he said it was common too. He mentioned that the people who do it are never dressed shabbily, which was true of the guy we saw today. He often also said these people try to sit down with foreigners and snag some of their food, although the girl from this afternoon was Chinese.