What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?

It's often the folks with the least who are willing to give the most.

I've heard that said by many, but it's been my experience as well.

I see them every day.

A lot of them I only see because I have "showdead" turned on.

You're most welcome, glad you find it helpful. And yes, "Why are you hitting yourself?" is not just a movie trope but a pattern of behavior to break. Takes a while to hunt down old patterns like that but keep at it, you'll figure it out for sure. Seek and you shall find

January 2009.

I'd been (reluctantly) going to Mozambique for a service job on a vessel, reluctantly as my grandmother was rather worse for wear and I feared she was nearing the end. She urged me to go, though, and to tell her all about it when I got back.

She died while I was in Maputo harbour, waiting for the vessel to dock so I could get to the airport and back home.

Can't remember much of the flight from Maputo to Jo'burg, but from South Africa to Frankfurt was terrific, considering the circumstances.

A stewardess quietly pulls me aside as I am about to board the flight to Europe and asks me something like 'Gee, you look terrible, what happened?'

I just shrug and tell her my grandmother died a few hours ago, we were really close, and I felt terrible for not being with her &c.

Next thing I know, she's hugged me for a long time - to the annoyance of people queuing behind me - before dumping me in a vacant seat in business, tells me she'll be back the moment we're airborne.

Sits down in the adjacent seat, starts asking me about good memories about my grandmother, talks to me throughout more or less the entire flight, ensuring me that her job is to make me as comfortable as she can given the circumstances.

Once we landed in Frankfurt, she asked if I was OK going on alone - she'd be happy to accompany me all the way back home if I needed her, Lufthansa would make that work, no worries.

We still exchange Christmas letters every year; I mailed this year's on Friday.

I've got lots of travel stories, not of which are as impressive as most of the other stories here, because I was never in a situation where I needed help but I have definitely experienced strangers where I'm a foreigner in their country just randomly deciding they're going to be nice to me. Nothing earth shattering, but definitely things that were the highlight of that particular trip.

The most recent one was walking through an "ancient village" in China, looking around at all the cool houses and poking my head into the obviously shop ones. There was one shop (I think, I never did actually find out!) with a load of traditional instruments that you could see through the open front door and someone playing to the side of the door. I poked my head in, and they stopped playing as they were too embarrassed to play for an audience, but I had a bit of a chat with her in Chinese about the instrument - it was a guqin, and similar concept to the guzheng I'd had a couple of hours of lessons on as part of my language classes back home. (The difference is that guqin is more like a 7 string violin without frets, a guzheng is 21 strings each a different note). About a minute later, a guy popped in and explained that the woman was shy playing in front of others, and when she told him that I'd mentioned the other instrument, he sat down and said "I'll teach you to play!". Which he did for about 10 minutes and then said, "Follow me, pipe, pipe, pipe!" He then took me down a small street and into a different shop that turned out to be a school for bamboo flutes (called xiao), which are like reedless descant recorders, so you have to make the base sound with your lips. Despite knowing the fingering from learning the recorder as a kid, I only managed to produce a note about 20 or 30 times from 100+ attempts, but they were impressed anyway. He sat me down to drink tea, and brought it all the other students and teachers and just had an impromptu tea party. Despite being in a bit of a hurry by then as I needed to catch the bus back to where I was staying before they stopped running about 10pm, I ended up being there for about 3-4 hours. They were probably going to just be hanging around their studio anyway, and the cost of the tea they used was probably a dollar at most, but it was a unique experience for me to see something that probably the other thousand people who visited that day would walk past and didn't even know existed! Plus I got to practice my language skills in a completely different way than I'd done before.

One act of kindness from me in my early 20s, when I had a year travelling around Australia, was offering to buy a meal for a homeless guy begging outside McDonalds. It seemed such a simple thing, but it was clearly very transformative for him. Obviously, he would get some money each day from people throwing coins into his hat, but he said that about 90% of people walked past him and completely ignored him, and even the people that donated usually didn't even make eye contact. He told me it was the first real conversation he'd had with someone for about 5 years and for just a few dollars and 10 minutes of my time, I was able to make him feel that someone did actually see him as a real human being with his own story to tell. It definitely shaped me as a person too, because I saw how something so simple and easy for me made such a big difference to him.