Something you should know...

Before I continue with our travel log, there is something you should know...We were photographed constantly. I shouldn't say "we". It was more like the kids and mostly Maria. We were different looking. We were called "westerners". I liked that word because it didn't label us by color but more by location. Our guide said that 7,000,000 people visit the Forbidden City each year. Of that number, there are roughly only about 50 Westerners on the day we toured. We were the minority. At the zoo and the shopping mall in Beijing, we were the only Westerners. Imagine traveling to a continent where everyone has black hair and here we come with our family of 5, another rarity in China, and our kids have light colored hair, Maria being the blondest of us all. Some people asked to take our picture and pose with the kids. Others just took our picture and maybe even pointed. Our guide, Eric, explained that China is a huge country. People travel to Beijing and other popular destinations from far reaching areas. They may have only seen blond haired people on tv or in a movie so we were an oddity to them. After a while Bob started taking pictures of the people taking pictures of the kids. We should have charged a fee to let people take our picture. We could have offset the cost of the trip!
The girls are probably all over someone's Facebook!

This man got so tickled that the people were taking our picture. Then he took our picture. Then the Chinese family took his picture!