Playing White Elephant Photo Exchange

World's worst blogger here.  I signed on and saw every one's awesome posts and decided that I wanted to participate in the awesomeness again.  So... here it goes.

Jon's family has a tradition on family vacations to do a white elephant gift exchange.  Each person can spend $5 on their gift and it has to be something that you find on vacation.  In Asia this was pretty easy.  The winner was Aimee's Top Ramen Toilet Paper Holder.   In Jamaica David won with the dog tooth that he got for free from a man with a tooth collection that he admired.  This year, we decided to forgo the gift buying because France and Switzerland were significantly more expensive than our last two trips.  Instead we all had to take pictures of the weirdest/ grossest thing we could find.

Jon and I took this game very seriously.  We searched and searched for oddities.  And... we won!

Here are a few of our runner up pictures, with the last picture being the cake winner.

Jon found a Four-leaf Clover in the Gardens of Versailles

Portrait of a dying queen in the Louvre.  We couldn't decide if the queen was male or female.

Baby face in an old school toilet.  The hole leads down to Lake Geneva.

Speaking of old school toilets.  We hadn't seen any like this since Malaysia.  Your feet go on the foot marks and you squat.  We all opted to hold it at this rest stop.

Fuzziest and biggest slug I have ever encountered.

 If you are faint of heart, you may want to look away now.  The rest of these are kind of grotesque, but they are the pictures that helped us win.

Smiling skull in the Catacombs of Paris.  6 million corpses were thrown down here during the Black Plague.

Bloated dead fish hanging out in the moat of one of the castles we visited.  Of course there were little kids throwing rocks at it to see if it might pop.

Dead rat all curled up in the roots of a tree near Pont D'Avignon.

Dead bird hanging out at the Roman Amphitheater in St Remy.

Winner!  Winner!  Chicken Dinner!  You are probably catching on to our theme at this point and realizing that this is probably not a garbage bag.  It is in fact a pile of body bags.  Jon and I stopped with David and Aimee at a French Cemetery because they are very different than American ones.  Families share a common crypt.  One of the crypt doors was rusted open and we used the camera to see inside because it was very dark.  This is what we saw.  A stack of about 20 body bags.  YUCK!!

So... I don't think I would try taking pictures inside of a grave or crypt again.  But, I would suggest that you try a photo white elephant exchange.  It's really fun to see who can come up with the weirdest stuff.  Trust me, the other families had awesome submissions as well.  The Mason's for example took a tour of Des Egouts de Paris... look up a translation and you will understand why they were probably second runners up.