With roughly half a million foreigners in this town, the expat scene in Beijing rarely feels bigger than an average European small town. Same faces appear again and again, and new faces often turns out to be connected to you some way or the other.

Just this weekend a complete stranger turned up at our party at home. After asking around for half an hour for "Kevin" it slowly dawned on him and us, that he 1) didn’t know anyone in the room, and 2) that he was really supposed to go to another party in a very similar looking house across the street. Another minute of chatting, and the guy turns out to be a colleague of a friend of mine.

They say that with six degrees of separation you end up being connected to David Beckham, Elton John and the king of Thailand. Cut that down to three degrees of separation and you know every single expat in Beijing.

The new aquaintance eventually got going to the party across the street he was actually invited to, but then came back twenty minutes later, complaining that that party was way too boring and that he’d prefer to hang out with us instead. A Beijing moment, indeed.