As I was writing down observations on my postcard, I remember thinking about how this postcard was not very aesthetically pleasing. The individual places on the postcard are all, in person, very beautiful, but I did not like the way the images were put together on the card itself.
While recording observations for this assignment, I spent most of my time thinking about the Mormon missionaries in Red Square. I actually think about them quite often because I have a very close friend who is currently on his mission trip in Brazil. I think that many people dehumanize these guys, making them out to be people whose only goal is to force us to convert to their religion. In reality, most of them are just regular old guys that we might have been friends with had they not been sent on their mission first. Just like most of us were raised to assume we were going pursue post secondary education after high school, these missionaries were raised to assume that they would be embarking on their mission. My friend writes to me a lot about being homesick and I can tell that on some days, he is pretty discouraged (I’m sure we’ve all wanted to quit school at some point). But, he also writes to me about the things that he is learning, how he is growing as a person, the cool people that he has met, and the popular music he likes to listen to in Brazil, which are the exact same things I tell him about when I write back. I understand that we don’t always have time to stop and have a conversation with the missionaries, but it’s really not hard to say hello or to wish them a nice day.
Lynn zhao 