ISpyShanghai

So I’m out on Friday night, enjoying a refreshing beverage with some friends and colleagues when the intense pain in my elbow becomes too much to bear.

The elbow hurt a little when I knocked it against a metal window frame the previous week but seemed to settle down. By Thursday it had decided it was going to start troubling me again, and by about 9pm on Friday night it was like a hot, angry pool of fire spreading out across my arm.

Emma took me to Huashan hospital, and not the fancy foreigner section either, the proper ghetto ward. It was full of either very old people or what looked like car-crash victims surronded by their family

Blimey, that guy looks really messed up

I said to Emma as a man was wheeled past us, mashed up, eyes rolling, hooked to multiple drips

Oh he’s probably just faking it for the compensation money

she replied- pushing to the front of the cashier queue.

Coming from Her Majesty’s Glorious Empire Of Britain I’m not used to paying for medical care. In our scented green land the National Health Service will treat anything from a tickly cough to a dicky heart free of charge- but in China you can’t even see the doctor until you’ve paid and had the receipt stamped in triplicate.

I’ve got to say though, I saw the doc, had blood taken and tested, medicine prescribed and the prescription filled within 30 minutes. The total bill was under 200RMB (well under 20 quid) and I was back in the pub by 10:30pm.

My Medicine

Here’s one of three medicines I was prescribed.
Looks like the guy who designed the packaging is a big fan of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, but then again, who isn’t?

The second day of my trip to Yunnan was spent entirely with a Chinese tour group. I’d asked a colleague for some advice on fun places to see around Kunming and he suggested the “Stone Forest”- a collection of weird shaped rocks about 50 miles from the city centre.

He also said he’d arrange transport, which I thought was nice, it’s probably worth hiring a mini-bus for half the day instead of trying to get taxis. Later on the arrangement became clearer:

“Please be in reception at 7am- you will be meeting a team”

I should’ve known then what I was in for- the infamous Chinese Tour Group. Following a shouty tour guide who holds a flag and barks information seems to be a relaxing way to spend a day for your average middle-aged Chinese couple.

It’s not my bag, but I figured it was too late to back out now.

The day went:

07:10 Meet up with pasty-faced youth at hotel reception, get into mini bus

07:40 Arrive at random apartment block in the backstreets of Kunming, pick up 3 other people in mini bus

08:10 Arrive at urine-soaked car park near Kunming Railway station to transfer to a bigger bus with 25 other people. I could’ve been at the Stone Forest by now.

08:30 Bus sets off, tour guide runs through ear-splitting monologue in rapid Chinese. Try to listen to MP3 player to drown out the prattle but am nearly overwhelmed by fumes from leaky exhaust under my seat

09:14 Tour guide stops talking for 45 blessed seconds as we go past a traffic accident. A car has rammed head first into a steel barrier at full speed. Driver must have died. Other team members look impressed

09:50 Bus arrives at a gift shop selling Jade and silver jewelry- other team members fight to throw money at the salespeople, I look on bewildered.

10:40 Bus arrives at random temple built next to a handy car park. Whilst praying to a thousand hand Buddha you can take a stick and have your fortune read for 10RMB. I suspect the fortune reads “A fool and his money is easily parted”

11:30 Set off on bus, drive uphill away from civilisation, towards the Stone Forest.

11:43 Are those farmers still using Ox to pull their cart?

11:51 Was that old guy smoking Opium?

11:53 That lady was definitely trying to make her baby smoke a cigarette. Yunnan is weird.

12:30 Finally arrive at gates to Stone Forest, more than 5 hours after we set off. Go to lunch.

Touching the correct rock is very important

When we finally got into the forest it was interesting enough, some rocks that look like a Cat / Monkey / beutiful woman (if you look out of one eye and squint really hard).

There are various rocks to touch which stop your teeth falling out, “have many girlfriends”, or live until you’re one hundred years old (although good luck with that one if your mother made you smoke as a baby), and of course there were lots and lots of things to flash a V-sign in front of whilst having your photo taken.

Suckers at the temple

After the forest we went for a ‘free’ tea ceremony (where people tried to sell us tea), a ‘free’ foot massage (where people tried to sell us Chinese medicine), a ‘free’ cup of coffee (where people tried to sell us coffee, coconut powder, seasame pancakes, flowers, etc. etc.) before finally escaping from “the team” and catching a furtive taxi to the airport.

Our ethnic tour guide

Tour to the Stone Forest 160RMB
including all transport, entrance & guide to temple, entrance & guide to Stone Forest, lunch.
(And side trips to 18 gift shops )

WARNING- today’s I Spy Shanghai features some extremely salty language.
Sorry Mum, it was the Chinese that did it, not me.

When you break medicine down to its brass tacks, it’s all about the nasty stuff; rashes in places you shouldn’t scratch, swellings in places that should have only limited swelling.

To avoid talking about this stuff, patients and doctors mix it up a bit and use words that are not so bold. So for example it’s called Gynaecology and not…

keep reading

OK so we’ve learnt / assumed that the insects in tiny wicker cages that I saw are either for:

a) fighting
II) the pleasant noise they make as they suffocate
4) ‘manpower’ medicine

But surely one Cricket is pretty much the same as another, so why is this fella going through specimens with a fine tooth comb?

Five years ago we had that “Muldy & Sculler” to help us out with these kind of mysteries. Now who have we got, Dr. House MD? He’s just Doogie Hauser with a hangover.

The last time I saw the Scratch Perverts (3 DJs who move their gramophone recordings back and forth to make young people dance) at Bonbon was in April. They were mint, the club was packed to the gills, and a smashing time was had by all.

They came back again on Saturday, this time with half-naked dancing girls, MC Jin from the states (who I’ve wanted to see for a long, long time) and free t-shirts for the punters. Predictably the club was packed, repacked, and packed thrice more- if you wanted a swig of your drink you had to ask the guy next to you to breathe in.

Once I got used to people shoving me like I was trying to carry a canoe onto the subway at 8:30 am, and the fact that Bonbon smells like the stairwell of a Glasgow multi-storey car park, it was a good laugh. I danced as much as my 8 inches of personal space would allow, had the inside of my mouth rinsed out with other people’s sweat, and went to bed happy. It wasn’t, however, as good as the first time I saw them, last week’s “Bananas” night, or getting raging drunk on alcoholic beer (4 more booze-free days left).

In the morning I went to pick up a suit at the fabric market. I’d specified a slim fitting number along the lines of Michael Caine in “Alfie”, but something got lost in translation and the guy gave me a baggy sack of cloth that I’d have needed to tie a piece of string round to see my hands. I gave it him back, took the ready-made one off the dummy as a compromise, and headed to the Insect & Bird Market.

Birds

This is a place that the enigmatic Emma had spotted in the Lonely Planet. 30 odd stalls selling turtles, kittens, Minah birds and hundreds and hundreds of Crickets in tiny cages.

Insects

I’m told that Chinese people like to buy these, hang them up in their house and listen to the gentle chirp-chirp of an insect starving to death inside a grisly wicker cage.
Odd? Yeah, I’d say that was odd.

Actually though, that can’t be the whole story because there were also stalls selling tiny paintbrushes to clean (or maybe tickle) insects, ceramic water dishes the size of a Leprechaun’s contact lens, men comparing row after row of tiny insects in specimen dishes like farmers at a bloodstock auction, and trays of cocoons hatching in front of watchful (/bored) sales clerks. It seems like bugs are big business here, but whether trained to fight to the death, kept as tiny pets for kids in small apartments, or ground up for medicine I couldn’t say.

Market

Once when I was in a sauna in Korea, I saw a guy with a series of red polka-dot marks on his back, each one about the same diameter as a cup. I assumed that either he slept on the world’s cheapest bed, or his wife beat him up very precisely with a wooden mallet (he, presumably assumed I was giving him the glad eye).

On Saturday, I had the traditional Chinese medicine treatment that is the actual cause of those bruises- it’s called ba huo gan and goes like this:

You swab the inside of a glass bowl with alcohol, light it, then put it on the patient’s back. They whimper like a little girl as the alcohol burns off, this creates a vacuum and sucks the (ample) spare skin up into the bowl.
Repeat this until the whole back is covered in globes, and the guy can ripple the skin on his back to make a sound like a wind chime.

Put a cotton sheet over him, go for a cup of tea.

Pull them off, one by one, enjoying the slurping sound as the air rushes back in- try to ignore the tears and pleas for mercy coming from the cowardly laowai.

Her face is a picture isn’t it?

Step back, admire handywork.

It looks a bit rough, but I actually enjoyed the whole thing, Liam described it as feeling like a stretched canvas- and I’d say it’s like that, plus a pleasant sunburn. The health benefits are numerous / dubious, but one thing is for sure- the marks have barely faded after 3 days and if they’re not gone before my July beach holiday, you can expect to hear scare stories about a giant Octupus on the beaches of Majorca.