Smile and Wave

This is our new motto, " Just smile and wave girls, smile and wave." Sometimes, we go places that have seen few black people OR few adoptive/mixed race families. The latest example was our trip to the Pyrenees. I think during the whole week we saw three other black people and one (obvious) adoptive family. In the apartment complex we were staying in, we were definitely the freak show. The girls got a little tired of it. And we'd just left Vilanova i la Geltru, the land of relative diversity...kind of a let down.

In order to keep our attitudes up and look at it from a positive perspective, or at least just not a negative one, we "smiled and waved" or said hello, or some other friendly-ish gesture. We would then have to giggle to each other something like, "Wow, that person doesn't get out much!"

The funniest (and slightly annoying, but mostly funny) incident was driving into a small stone village in the mountains and taking a wrong turn around a corner. We stopped immediately once we saw that we couldn't go through, but an old man was walking down the middle of the street shaking his finger at us to indicate that we couldn't get through. We turned around and he came up to our window and explained that it was a dead end. Then he looked in the back seat and asked if the girls were adopted. Si. "Are they Japonese?"

He was dead serious.

I almost swallowed my tongue stifling my laughter.

I guess the good thing about all this attention is that it is generally out of curiousity and not out of meanness. The old man who thought they were Japanese probably didn't leave his mountain village much, if at all. OK, so we brought a little variety into his world. It seems everyone in the area got a little spice to their day when we walked by, smiling and waving.