The Uncomfortable Incident of Chinese Picture Takers

Today, Amber, Elizabeth, and I went to the Yunan Minority Village. By this time, having lived in C-land for quite a few years, we are quite accustomed to the "sly" walk-by photography... where a Chinese person tries to make it look like they're not taking your picture, but the sudden camera flash in your face kind-of gives it away. We're also accustomed to people asking to take pictures with us as they hand the camera to their friends and snuggle in close for the picture like we're old friends. But, today, while trying to watch the Elephant Show at the Cultural Village, was a new experience.

We were sitting in the stands watching all the people taking pictures of their friends sitting in an elephant's trunk, and people teasing the elephant with bananas before letting them throw it into their mouths; when, three ladies appeared beside us on the stairway. Without saying a word to us (either verbal or charade-y), one lady was taking her time, laying out the perfect picture of us with her camera from roughly 1 foot away. Amber and Elizabeth tried to hide their faces in a (we-don't-want-our-pictures-taken sort of way), after the lady had obviously taken a few pictures, I decided to humour her and make a funny face.

Next (still without saying any word to us), one of the ladies sat down in front of us, while we made confused what-are-you-doing faces, and the other lady took another picture. I tried to ask the lady sitting in front of us posing for the picture if she wanted a picture with us (all in chinese), but she completely ignored me, and just posed for the shot. Next she took the camera away from her friend, and her friend sat down right next to Elizabeth and, still without saying one word, or even doing one half-charade, put her arm around Elizabeth to pose for the picture. Elizabeth sat with a look of confused horror, as Amber finally said "look, if you want to take pictures with us, you at least need to ask!" (also in Chinese).

At this point, we decided that maybe the Elephants weren't entertaining enough to sit through random Chinese people hugging us for pictures while acting as if we didn't exist.

Other than this rather odd experience, the Cultural Village was quite nice, partially due to it being almost devoid of people (something hard to accomplish in C-land), and also because we had a beautifully sunny day to walk around in. :D