It is very unusual to have more than one child here. I get noticed a lot here with two kids. Not only do I have two kids, we all have fair skin, my kids are much chubbier than Asian kids (especially Jake), we have light hair (Jake is near blond and the sun is lightening it again with all our pool time) and we all have glasses.
We get stopped approximately three times every time I go out. People ask, “Why specs?” pointing at Jake. “Why specs? So young?” I’ve learned to tell them (and a bit of an accent is starting to come out – yikes) “He’s quite long sighted.” Long sighted means far sighted here. One lady knew enough to play with him today in Chinatown and ask him to point to his glasses rather than his specs so he was able to play along with her, usually he just stares at the people.
Maddie gets lots and lots of looks everyday. She takes it in stride and doesn’t realize that it’s weird to me. She just thinks everyone is friendly. Without realizing it, she wore her traditional Chinese dress to Chinatown today. Oh my gosh was that girl a HIT!! Near every Asian person we passed pointed her out to whoever they were with. It took me a while to figure out why she was getting so much extra attention today. Finally I got it and had to laugh. She loves that dress. It’s hard to get it into the laundry she wears it so much. (Then when I do get it, I ruined my other clothes because the dye leaked onto everything else.)
We only had one photo op today in Chinatown. People will really stop us on the street or in the mall and ask my permission to take my children’s photo. I thought it was funny and it happens once or twice a week to my children. Then my new friend Brenda came to Chinatown with us today. She is super bright blond and so is her cute four year old daughter, Claire. I was bargain shopping at the time, but the other ladies in our group told me something that made me laugh out loud. They had an entire tour bus come over and ask permission to take photos of them. So the entire group of 30 people were snapping away, getting pictures.
3 comments:
I'm sure enjoying reading about all your adventures. I've always admired that you are game for just about anything.
Loving reading this!
When we lived in Hawaii, Japanese tourists would ask my Mom ALL the time to take pictures of her three daughters (she often dressed us all matching too, since she sewed a lot of our clothes) and between the matching and my sister's super blonde hair, we were a hit. And the time that sticks out to us the most was when a man gave us each a $5 bill after getting our pictures taken with his family. For a 2, 5 and 8 year old, it was like we hit the jackpot :-) To this day we're still amused how many vacation photo albums we must be in on another continent :-)
The taking photos thing makes us laugh too. It happens ALL over the place. Now, when we see a bunch of Japanese tourists, we take bets on who/how many will ask. We laugh when we visit the Keukenhof to view the BEAUTIFUL tulips and the japanese stop to take pictures of our kids. Always entertaining how much they like the round eyes of our kids, but then again, I think their kids are SO CUTE too, I just never thought/think to ask to take pictures!
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