The Russian and the Chinese Fashion Designer

This semester I'm in a class called Business in Australia, now the thing with this class is you are only allowed to take the class if you are an international student so as it turns out I'm the only native english speaker in the class (about half the students are French, the rest Chinese or Thai with a Russian thrown in the mix) except for the professor who's British. So on the first day the prof paired us up with someone and we had to talk to them for a bit and then introduce them to the class and they in turn would introduce us..you know getting to know you games. My partner was from Taiwan and after several botched attempts for me to say his name right he finally said I could just call him Chris. Once the introductions started hilarity ensued, mostly because people kept saying inappropriate things about their partner such as their age and they were too young or old for this program or they hate certain foods or they come from small town in China with only 7 million people stuff like that. The best bit though had to be this Russian girl Katya and a Chinese girl Shirlee. Now Shirlee was wearing an interesting outfit, it looked to be a full on pink velour sweatsuit and some type of space boots. So Katya says to the class, This is Shirlee from China, in China she studied fashion designing obviously. At this point I bust out laughing (no one else does) and Katya turns red as if I was laughing b/c of her english or something, I don't think she meant to be funny at all, not from the expression on her face but it was funny nonetheless. The she goes on to tell us that Shirlee was also professional piano player in China playing in many bars (again laughs from yours truly) and I didn't hear anything after that b/c I kept thinking how Shirlee was a fashion designing drinkie girl in Shanghai and that threw what little focus I have to begin with right out the window.