I recently was afforded another break, which I had to spend in Beijing in order to arrange my visa to India. The first two days of break were spent waiting in front of the Indian Embassy, watching professional tour guides skip the long line in order to process the visas of twenty Chinese citizens who plan to run amuck in New Delhi while toting $4000 SLR cameras and wearing identical fluorescent hats. A strange thing about the Chinese tourism business is that there is still the image of the “bushwhacker” anthropologist wearing all khaki and documenting his findings for the world. In most ads concerning tourism in China or abroad, this image persists, contrasting sharply with the reality I see at every mildly-touristy spot- 30 Chinese people all wearing the same thing, following around a flag-bearing tour guide while snapping close-up pictures of fake flowers.

However, my break was not without its benefits. Because I was here, I was available to model for Crocs, an American shoe company specializing in ugly foam shoes. One of my classmates works for this company and needed to find an Asian-looking boy to model these shoes. So, I was invited to go out to eat at a ritzy Chinese restaurant. (I think the greatest part of my study abroad has been mingling with all classes of people, a freedom I don’t exercise in the US.) They decided I “looked healthy enough” and told me to go to their office the next day so we could go to the Great Wall to take pictures.

The next day, my classmate and I went to their office, and we took an extremely expensive cab ride to “The Commune”, a hotel complex overlooking the Badalang portion of the Great Wall. When the hotel was first constructed, it won international praise for its modernist architecture. While I was there, it was clear that this praise was well-deserved, as each of the two-dozen structures on the compound were unique and complex. However, the buildings, made of bamboo, rusting metal, and huge panes of glass, weren’t suited for housing the event that was taking place that day – an Easter celebration catering to rich Chinese families. Children played among priceless works of art crafted by masters of the contemporary Beijing scene, finding painted eggs among the meticulously planted shrubbery. Among all of this commotion, the fathers of the children were recording their child’s every move with the aforementioned $4000 cameras. Most of the servants, who greatly outnumbered the patrons, wore the same thing – black pants and a matching black shirt with a single red star on the chest. Some servants, however, were forced to wear different clothes, forced to dress as clowns and enormous bunny rabbits in order to entertain the children. Perhaps the least strange sight was me - amidst all of this, I was wearing horrendously ugly shoes while getting photographed atop and inside the award-winning modernist architecture.