Over the last couple of days in China, my fame has reached stratospheric heights. First of all, we visited Beijing summer place and not only did I have a classic few photo requests, I had an actual queue. It started off with a simple mother-daughter shot and soon turned into a Nikon frenzy. The queue was getting so long people were even settling for plain old Rory. Eventually I roped him into my shots and together we done our bit for the community. Afterwards Rory had the cheek to call me a “Bloody crowd pleaser” due to my willingness to pose in almost any fashion for a fans photo. 
The clear favourite was the “2 hand peace sign with semi-cheesy grin" pose which I’ve got down to a fine art now. Just as I though my fame surely couldn't get any bigger we went shopping in silk street market and while we were poking around trying to accumulate various pieces of tat for presents, a young lad came over, introduced himself and offered us his assistance. We were obviously a little dubious of this to start with and tried to politely palm him off, but he just kept following us around. Eventually he cut to the chase and removed a weird little magic goose egg from his pocket. He then said “I would like exchange this salt egg for something your possession”. Ill be honest, I thought he’d lost the plot. I didn’t have a clue what he was running on about, but eventually after a lot of rewording and sign language, it turned out he was on a mission to keep exchanging items that he considered to be of greater material value that the previous until the market shut and we were his latest customers. I was at a bit of a lose end as I had nothing to give him other than a selection of biros I’d accumulated from various hostel receptions and pub quiz's over the last 8 months, so in an attempt to get rid of him I offered him a neon retractable Bic. 
Rather embarrassingly for myself he didn’t consider the highly particle and working biro to be a suitable exchange for his scrawny little egg and pretty much laughed in my face. To add to my humiliation it transpired that he was actually filming the whole encounter for a Chinese TV show. National Television exposure, now I'm in the big league.
