Every stranger is a person

It was a very disserty weekend,

I had to distribute a questionnaire from house to house for a survey on home energy... I admit that the topic isn't as interesting as a dissertation could be, but I needed to know about environmental design in this part of the world. Would be a waste of money if i travelled all the way here to learn what i could have at home.

Decided to distribute it personally house by house because I was hoping for a better response rate, rather than sending it out by mail.. only got 20 respondents in two days though.

Anyhow, it was quite an interesting experience meeting random people in their own environment.

I went to a high-end area on Saturday. People there were nice - i guess its because most of them were educated people and knew what i had to do for my research.

Went into the house of a landscape architect. It was a lovely place with full height glass doors opening to a back garden. Then, oddly finding a women and her mum who were both on benefits living in a house without central heating in the high-end area as well [but her cats were extremely healthy].

Then on Sunday I targeted the lower-end houses. Was almost demoralized by how unfriendly people in that area were. Most of them were middle eastern/Indian etc. sheesh...A lot of the immigrants don't even speak English!

things got better in the later half of the day.. Locals and students were always willing to answer the survey. I was pleasantly surprised a couple of times when i said, "I'm doing a quick survey", and their immediate reaction was; "would you like to come in for tea?". Haha.

Met a 63 year old man who lived in the same house since he was born. He started out trying to act tough.. "I don't like people knocking on my door promoting, distributing flyers etc" ..... "are you sure its only gonna take 5 minutes?"

Ended up spending half an hour with him. Showed me his living room... talked about how the area changed in 50 years and so on.

It was kinda fun... Frustrating at times.. but all good. Its like the world is one big party. Just chat up random strangers and you'd get a nice story from every one of them. After all, every stranger around you has a unique story of their own.