Click Click Click Click

Today has been one of the more remarkable days I have had in my short lifetime. We went on a tour of Zhongshan that was put on by the city for foreigners who live here. The people we work with at the school obviously really wanted us to go and we wanted to see more of the city we live in so we decided to go. There is so much I want to share about this wonderful day but I thought I would begin with one of the funniest things about the day. I do not have time to write about it all now. 

The owner of the school named John, who lives in Canada, decided at midnight the night before that he wanted us to wear school shirts on the tour. It is really lucky for us that the Bond shirts they gave us are lime green polo's with sizes ranging from XL-XXXL with fabric that does not breath at all. We really struggle with standing out as seven tall, white, blonde, English speaking Americans. Today we were seven Americans wearing matching lime green shirts. We didnt blend in very well and it became apparent why John wanted us to stand out. The tour was kicking off a "Through the Eyes of Foreigners" photo contest. We knew that there were going to be professional photographers there but we did not know what their purpose was. Apparently their purpose was to follow foreigners around all day and take thousands of pictures of them. If that was not their purpose, it quickly became their purpose. We went on a boat ride in a part of the city called Xiolin. The photographers, about thirty of them, would take a million photo's of all of us in the boats and then go running to the next bridge to take more photo's. Lets just say that I saw something cool and wanted Wendy to take a picture of me in front of it, there would instantly be about 18 photographers with their huge camera's snapping photos. At first we were gracious and would smile and laugh but by the end of the day I would just walk away if I didnt want my picture taken. We had to be very sneaky if we were posing for a picture because the photographers would catch us and start clicking away. One of my favorite things was when Alex and I were taking a picture of ourselves. I held up the camera and snapped a photo of us and our calligraphy. Unfortunately, one of the photographers saw this and asked to take our picture. We smiled at him and he said, "no no, you take picture and I take picture". He wanted a picture of us taking a picture. All of a sudden there were dozens of photographers snapping photo's of us. I think the lime green polo shirts were a big draw with the picture takers too. I have no idea what is going to happen with all the pictures that were taken of us today. All I know is that I never want to wear that lime green polo again. I will post more photo's soon. I will be gone on vacation for a couple days and then I will be back with plenty of things to post about. 

The real irony of today is that my camera's battery died right away so I didnt get to take many pictures. However, do not despair because I have roommates who hooked me up with some sweet photo's. All these pictures are Alyssa's and she has quite the eye.