Picked up a nonsensical-fantasy-whateverbook last week for some light entertainment... Thing ended, and I still cannot believe this!!, so insanely tragically, that I next took up re-reading the Asterix comics - those at least are a definitely safely happy dose of absurd fun to recover from that particular shock.
Wild boars, five-o-clock hot water, warm beer, cold red wine, mint sauce, skull goblets, everything in sour cream and other culinary interludes aside, one of the recurrent jokes in the series is pointing to your head / tapping on your temple and exclaiming that the people from whatever nationality the story is currently dealing with are completely out of their mind.
Which is the exact same gesture a passer-by Japanese ojiisan used when referring to me just the other day. Whilst talking directly to me, I might add. The implication in that case being, that since I was in Kyodai, I must have a "good head", a.k.a be smart...
So morale of the story: don't presume gestures mean the same thing in different cultures. ;)
(And yes, this specific gesture I have known about for ages. I do wonder how many I'm still missing even after, uh, what, 9? years of living here, though...)
Cheers,
Hedi
