Pesky American tourists and their cameras...

Right down the street from this polished tourist area is a dirty but life-filled suburban (I guess it's sort of like the suburbs) area. It reminded me of times at home when I'd be driving around downtown Rochester looking for The Spot coffee shop, take a wrong turn, and immediately finding myself in the heart of the projects. Except here I wasn't so afraid of being shot and stripped of all my valuables. It was a much friendlier low-class neighborhood. Or was it middle class? It's hard to tell in developing China.

The streets here weren't as busy as others in the city, but still so full of life that all I wanted to do was stop and take pictures of everything and everyone. But it's hard to take pictures when everybody's looking at you, and I imagine it's a little intrusive to have foreigners walking through your neighborhood and snapping photos of everything they see. So what I ended up doing was keeping my camera on the action photo setting and holding it at my side, pointing and shooting in the direction of things that I found interesting, hoping that the picture would come out alright. Most of them are pretty crooked and off-center, but I did manage to catch a few good ones. Nora was a little more assertive about her pictures, so she probably has some better shots, but she also got caught red-handed by this group of guys sitting out on the corner.



This is the masterpiece of my collection from yesterday. The man was playing guitar and singing for the others (pretty well, too), when he spotted Nora framing up a picture. Stopping abruptly in mid-note, he immediately called her out. Also wanting to catch a picture of this genuine piece of Chinese life, I already had my camera pointed in that direction, and was able to covertly capture the moment holding the camera at my side. The man rushed over to her speaking quickly in Chinese, gesturing toward the camera and rubbing his fingers together, suggesting that she pay him for the picture. His friends all sat there laughing hysterically as Nora frantically said the only Chinese she knew that was appropriate for the situation, "Bu hao, bu hao!" Luckily, the man was only joking and eventually allowed Nora and her camera to pass through in peace.

A few more blocks walking through the neighborhood, and we arrived at a beautiful Daoist temple, all in the traditional Chinese architecture, with beautiful carvings and statues. Yet another one of those places a point-and-shoot camera doesn't capture very well. We looked around, burned some incense, and moved on.