I find it weird that it’s still a thing that we, as white people, are a novelty in so many countries. Yet, in 2025, despite such an interconnected world, we get stares (and more) in many places including India, China and Indonesia.

When M and N traveled to Japan in the early 2000s we were asked to be in few people’s pictures – before the mobile phone and social media. In Korea, a guy rode his bike into a tree because he was too busy looking at me.

These days, everyone’s got a mobile phone and an internet connection. We’ve had a couple of occasions where our tuk tuk / Grab drivers have video called their family to show us off. A woman in the subway in northern China touching the kids while her friend takes pictures – despite us saying no and moving away twice. Even at a shopping centre in Jakarta (the capital of Indonesia with 11 million people) there were loads of people dressed up Japanese manga style (presumably some sort of event as this was the only place we saw folks dressed like this) and I am pretty sure we still got more looks than them!

Last year, one of the kids asked us if an Indian person would get this sort of attention in Europe. Obviously that’s a no, but they could get treated differently due to their skin colour. (So many privileges in being white!)

The kids particularly attract attention with some people taking (not so) sneaky photos/videos. Some do ask, which is slightly better, but mostly recently we’ve taken to saying no to any pictures, especially of the kids. We have zero control of what a random stranger will do with these pictures. They could be posted publicly on any and every platform and we’d be clueless. What makes it worse now, is that there are tools that allow you to search for someone’s face across the internet to gather images or videos and see what they’ve been up to. Which perhaps doesn’t seem that harmful, but with the rise of AI it’s now a few clicks to combine and then manipulate these images or videos into something else (like deep fakes to bully, blackmail or scam) and share it across the world in seconds. For the adults, it’s not great but for the kids this is a hard no from me. (As much as we can prevent such things!)

So we keep an eye out for sneaky amateur photographers, warn each other and turn out backs or just move away. At least in Europe & the UK we won’t be such a spectacle!