One of our best hosting experience was with some Singaporean-Chinese ladies coming to my home town, Tromsø, during the Chinese New Year holiday. They had never seen snow before, and there they came to our totally white landscape, having problems standing upright already as soon as they got out from the airport! Their stay was surely very exotic for them - they enjoyed it so much, they came back in the Chinese New Year two years later!

I've several times experienced some sort of cultural barriers with Asians and Chinese - like once we were travelling around in China for two weeks. We didn't manage to find hosting that time (difficult when being a family, and I only cared checking the BW site), but we did interact with some Chinese on the way. On our last day we decided to join a guided tour group, so we ended up being in the company with some old Australian retired people. It was wonderful being able to have some "small talk"-sessions with some "Western" people again! Hm, I'm digressing again.

Now those Singaporeans, they were totally on our wavelength - our humor was very much aligned, we were laughing a lot with them during their stay - though we were probably very much unaligned on politics. They were working in a copyright-enforcement-agency, obviously I didn't talk any politics with them, or the good vibes could have crashed completely and totally :-)