Last week, Eve and I went out to the minority village on the edge of town. An odd experience. It's supposed to showcase the minority peoples who live in China (China is very diverse in the sense that there are loads of people groups, the majority people group just seems to have tried in the past to suppress them). Each minority group has its own "village" there, which is supposed to showcase traditional life in some way. In light of all of this, I was trying to work out if it is more of a zoo than a than a museum/theme park. It reminded me of the colonial museum just outside Brussels, which tells of how they got some natives over the colonies a century or so ago and made them live in the woods so the Belgians could see how these people lived in their natural habitat. It beggars belief.
Anyway, it was all good fun - we were with one of the girls from the flat who belongs to one of the minority groups. Towards the end of the day, we ended up getting drawn into some parade where each of the minorities sent a group in and danced around (Eve and I were obviously natural fits - there's a photo somewhere which I'll stick up on flickr). After about an hour - sensing the thing would never end - we made an exit.
The abiding memory of the day though was the number of photos Eve got dragged into - by total randoms. We must have got to at least 20 in about 2-3 hours. It's clearly the done thing to pull a blonde Westerner into your photo and then make the "v for victory" sign. The Chinese we have come across really do have an extraordinary gift for posing in photos. The kids particularly are very well trained in the art of adopting slightly pretentious model poses.
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