Photo Props

What's going on here? I don't think Corey is giving into the recent celebrity inspired trend of adopting Asian babies, and I'm pretty sure she isn't being confused for the Pope or a president... so then how did she come to have a confused child placed in her arms?

It's a phenomenon I may have mentioned before as a side note in previous posts, but it deserves the full attention of a post unto itself. You'd need to be fairly visually impaired not to notice the differences between the Chinese and their "western" friends. Many Chinese are so tickled by the idea of us foreigners that they'll drop whatever they're doing to try and get us to take a photo with them. Or their bewildered child.

Since us foreigners usually travel in packs, we are often recruited to take the picture, making it hard to take one of the strange scene ourselves. Luckily this time (way back from the Dandong trip to be honest), there were enough of us around that I was able to sneak behind the unsuspecting shutterbug and not only take the same picture she was (as seen above), but take a behind the scenes shot as well!



All in all, it's a strange but flattering thing. It doesn't happen often, but when they do, they tend to be generally excited by it and very friendly. If you're lucky they'll even blush a little bit, and I'm not just talking about the little kids forced by their parents. So cute.

I find myself getting stared at a lot here in China, and one thing I don't do after responding to giggled "hello"s and "what's your name"s, is shouting out the perennial classic line of "Take a picture, it'll last longer" because I know full well that they just might do that.

Say Cheese,
Shawn