It was a dark and stormy summer's night in Changchun. After leaving a restaurant, I dashed across the sidewalk and jumped into the nearest taxi, nearly landing in the puddle of rain water between the street curb and the open door.

I promptly told my driver (in my best Northeastern Mandarin dialect) where I needed to go. This average-looking man slowly turned his head to look at me, blinked twice and said, "Your Chinese isn't very good. Do you speak English?"

I smiled all the way home.

This was a story first published in 'Changchun Stories' in 2009. Compliled by Richard Roman and Alessandro "Alex" Antonicelli

• Changchun is NOT a city we easily find on the map.

• Changchun is NOT Shanghai, it is not Beijing and it is NOT Guangzhou, full of factories and smoke.

It was late on March 11, 2007 when I arrived at the Changchun Airport. I was expecting to be met by a representative from Raffles, but when I picked up my bags and made my way to the main exit, I found that no one was there to meet me. I had corresponded by email with a contact at the college, so I made my way to a pay phone only to find that it was not working. I guess my face showed my concern. Immediately, a Chinese man approached me and handed me his cell phone. He spoke to me in Chinese, but my Chinese was so rusty that I could only understand that the public phones did not work. He indicated that I should use his cell phone. I quickly called my contact, Anne, only to find that her cell phone was turned off. "Now what do I do?", I thought.

I like tennis, I think I like to think that I can play tennis pretty well, well its ok - neither good nor bad. In fact I have played since the age of eight but this means nothing really I'm still not that good.

Anyway, football and tennis are the two sports which I am most interested in and therefore when I came to Changchun all the way from Italy, I tried to look for someone who wanted to play with me.