In these situations I did what I had been advised to do – say nothing, break eye contact, and keep walking which was usually sufficient to shake them. Another time I had was tag-teamed by two extraordinarily persistent “students” who, despite my best efforts at ignoring them, kept following me saying “we want to practice English”. So I turned around and calmly said – “Okay – please repeat after me – We are now walking to the police station”. I’m not sure if they completely understood but they left abruptly. After about 2 days of this I started having some fun with it (probably not an advisable thing to do) – such as when they approached me with “practice English” I would speak French, which would throw most of them off completely.

But then I encountered a real pro – I had just exited a coffee shop near the US embassy and an older woman came up to me asking for the time, which proceeded to some general smalltalk. She spoke excellent English – it was clear, concise, with proper use of tense, articles, subject-verb agreement along with a good vocabulary. So I’m thinking that I don’t know what she ultimately wants ,(if anything), but given that we were near the embassy perhaps she was employed there in some capacity. So I gave her, at least initially, the benefit of the doubt. I complimented her on her fluency and asked about her background and where she worked though her responses were vague – “Oh I’m in education and I’ve picked up a few words of English here and there – practice makes perfect you know”. Hmmmm….

She continued with some generic comments about the weather and traffic and then said she knew of a place that provided introductory lessons on Chinese calligraphy and she would be happy to take me there. Hmm – no one had said anything about chinese calligraphy so the transition was quite clumsy – but there it was – a variation on the ole tea ceremony. I said “No thank you – I haven’t heard of that one before”. She didn’t like my response at all. Her eyes narrowed and she said to me in a sharp tone – “You have shifty eyes – like those of a criminal”. Wow. So now, in light of the fact that I had called her on the scam, she is accusing me of being the criminal ? Nice attempt at redirection. So I then asked her “so how do you know so much about criminals anyway?” She pretended not to understand and simply walked away to track another foreigner who had just passed by…..

Since that time I’ve become practiced at sending out the “don’t bother me vibe” though not being readily identifiable as a tourist helps also.