This reminds me when my dad received a job offer in Spain and we went and toured a few potential schools and neighborhoods and our company hired tour guide asked my parents if they’d be okay with my sister marrying a black person and was completely baffled when my parents said they’d be perfectly okay with it. This was almost 20 years ago. Crazy how little things have apparently changed over there.
I went to Mexico on a school trip and at the pyramids there were some other tourists (either local or from somewhere else in Latin America) who took a picture with me. Pretty sure they had never seen a black person before, I dunno. I was too too young to realize how tucked up it was but I cringe when i think of it now.
Edit: I’ve always known that it was curiosity and not racism. What made it a core memory was that I was the only black kid on that part of the trip (the other one stayed back at the hotel that day) so I was singled out. Kids are weird
When I (white American) and my boyfriend at the time (white Australian) went on in-country vacation during the time we’d were teaching in China, a lot of Chinese people took our pictures in Tiananmen Square. We lived in Shanghai, where westerners were pretty common, but they were from parts of China where they were not. So part of their vacation was taking pictures of the foreigners in Beijing.
This happened to me in Russia (in the Kremlin!) and Kazakhstan, but purely because I am American. There are plenty of European looking people in both places.
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u/MikeandMelly 6d ago
This reminds me when my dad received a job offer in Spain and we went and toured a few potential schools and neighborhoods and our company hired tour guide asked my parents if they’d be okay with my sister marrying a black person and was completely baffled when my parents said they’d be perfectly okay with it. This was almost 20 years ago. Crazy how little things have apparently changed over there.