I am very tall. And very white.

These are two facts I knew about myself, but they seem to be new thing for many people.

Asia is a fantastic place to visit long-term. I honestly can’t imagine living here forever any more than I could envision myself in Morocco forever. Today, Sunday, I went to the all-denominational church here and was stunned at the number of ex-pats who have relocated here for the long term.

I just couldn’t do that. I have a friend who’s traveling now, scouting locations for her retirement community. She’s in Thailand this weekend. That’s not for me. I’ll wind up in Florida again at some point and not stay abroad for the rest of my life.

But in the meantime, I don’t mind being a two-years-at-a-time nomad, and Asia is a really good place to be stationed for awhile. It’s cheap (well, the parts I frequent are, anyway, the food is good and there are massages to be found everywhere.

Guangzhou has quite a few massage places. Since I mucked up my shoulder at Christmas during an all-body massage after hiking those mountains in Hangzhou, I’ve shied away from those a bit and have instead opted for the foot massage.

To most Americans, feet are those things on the end of your legs that house Nikes, but somehow here a foot massage goes all the way to your scalp. It’s pretty cool but can definitely be painful.

As I’ve been training for this 10k, my legs are absolutely killing me, especially the right calf. A foot massage to rectify that is absolutely the way to go.

I went with a colleague to a place that was new to me. Technically, I think it was new to him, too; it was a place he’d seen on his way to an acupuncturist a couple of weeks before. It said “Amazing Foot Massage,” and no one ever lies in advertising, right?

Since I speak not a word of Mandarin, I tend to just point to things like menus and hope for the best. This particular colleague had some Mandarin but we still had some issues but fortunately found ourselves directed to these big comfy chairs that reclined completely.

Massages here involve tea and fruit, in this case, watermelon. We’d finished the first round with our feet soaking in more tea when the masseuses returned to the room. My colleague, an extrovert, was chatting them up. Completely oblivious to the content of the conversation, I was just trying to relax as my masseuse was working on my feet and legs.

He translated some for me, telling me they’d asked him where he was from originally and then who I was. He’s maybe 5-3 and is a Vietnamese-American. I told him to tell them I was his daughter and mess with their heads.

I don’t know if he did that or not, but my masseuse just kept looking up at me, kicked back in the chair. She finally asked my buddy something and he laughed.

She’d wanted to know about my ancestry because I was so “very tall and very white.”