Stage 3 of Culture Shock: Fight!

Last night I experienced something that I recollect now with feelings of incredulousness, which I hesitate to write about now lest this entry casts a specter of negativity over the otherwise positive things I could be and will be writing about instead. I was hanging out with a group of friends on a nearly abandoned street, having just left a bar (the results of which would have exacerbating effects later) when a fifty-something woman of Chinese descent was chased into our midst by a group of three or four teenage girls. The girls were shouting spectacularly rude things at the Chinese woman, and even grabbed a trash can and tried to run her over with it. Of course, we told them to stop. They responded with further rudeness. We persisted in our attempts to intervene, escalating the confrontation to a degree where the Chinese woman was able to escape. At some point one of the girls slapped my friend Clem in the face, and three or four teenage guys dressed in matching pink hoodies came out of nowhere to join the girls. Around this point my friends and I were throwing around some pretty rude language ourselves, and it began to dawn on me that the situation was rapidly degrading to a drunken brawl. Fortunately, also out of nowhere, appeared these three big Irish guys, who were on the side of not chasing immigrants and shouting racist things at them. This is about the time that the mean girls and the pink hoodie gang decided to leave. Somehow, before they left, they managed to lift friend Matt's credit cards and cell phone. We had an excellent chat with the Irish guys while Matt borrowed a phone to cancel his own and his credit cards (which already had a 3000 dollar pending charge--the credit card thieves here are really fast).

What an adventure. I'm sure there are better ways to handle that sort of conflict, but I think we chose one of the most interesting methods.