Wha-cha looking at?

My Mother is camera obsessed.  This can be a great thing when you are in a wonderfully strange country with a two year demanding attention and can just forgo the camera and steal your mother’s pictures for your own blog.  But it can also be a little annoying and for Hubs a little embarrassing. 

My Parents have taken Sally’s two sisters in turn to other countries and for this trip Sally.  (Totally wish they were MY grandparents) And my Mother likes to compile a scrapbook at the end of the trip so they will have lasting memories.  Very sweet gesture, and a great idea, but in order to get material for the scrapbook my Mother has to document every single place, action or fart that happens on the trip.  Sometimes she will have preconceived ideas of pictures she wants and then we have to stage them, or re-enact something that happened so she can get a picture, or we have to listen to “Oh shoot, I missed it, that was such a great picture and I missed it, I’m NEVER going to get a shot like that and it was so perfect, look out for more cows….”

These pictures can create some funny stories.  We have a picture of stunned airport security officers telling my Mom not to take photos.  My mom’s defense was “Well I said in front of her about five times “Oh I have to get a picture of this!””  Maybe the security officer didn’t hear my mom say this because she was too busy scanning my Mother’s camera as my Mom was saying it? 

When we went to the crowded market on the beach I thought to myself, “good my mom is taking pictures I don’t have to embarrass myself”.  Hubs thought, “Wow this is embarrassing” and I’m sure Sally thought “Don’t make me pose anymore”.

Although my Mom was making a spectacle of taking pictures for me to steal from her, she commented that people really didn’t stare at her like she thought they would.  I was blown away.  I thought people were staring more than I thought they would.  I don’t know if it’s the Hindu wedding necklace I’ve been wearing every day since we left, or if I’m just prettier than my Mom, but I’ve been getting some real hard looks.  I expected people to stare, we aren’t in an overly touristy city, and I do have pearly white skin and blue eyes, but what I didn’t expect was the guy literally standing two feet from me, facing me straight on and staring for about ten minutes.  I don’t like to be rude, so I tried not to stare back, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t blink the entire ten minutes.  Riding around in the auto-rickshaw, Sally watched a guy stare at me so hard that he drove his motorcycle into a passing pedestrian.   Maybe they are just intrigued by my Scottish/German stature?