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NOTE: The following contains adult themes and references to objects which may still be illegal in some US states. Proceed at your own risk.
There are a few public occasions outside the s*x industry where the words “c*ck ring” and “cl*t teaser” are not out of place. Police Christmas parties in regional Australia have historically been one of them. Another, until it was replaced by Fine Bright Optics, was the pharmacy opposite Chaoyang Hospital.
The original reason for going there is lost to time. It couldn’t have been a paracetamol run – the supermarket near work filled that particular void and, from memory, the staff took longer than you would expect to lay their hands on a 20-pack of Saridon capsules. (One must make do until Panadol, the analgesic of choice, is more widely distributed on the mainland.) It may have involved a telephone card but, in any case, a man in a white coat and on the verge of elderly promised to help and disappeared into the back room. His departure left three women in yellow jackets to tend to the mid-morning rush of one.
As the children of pharmacists well know, dust is the enemy of any dispensary and two of the women occupied themselves making sure none settled on the shop’s glass countertops. The third woman had a mop and was focusing on the lunch box aisle. The shop had three aisles but all roads led to Rome. At the end of the row, just above a collection of foldout toilet aids and past the contraceptives and their natural bedfellows, the antibiotics, was a wall devoted to s*x toys, or more accurately, s*xual instruments. Few subjects, alive or inanimate, look good under fluorescent lighting and the display had all the sense of play of exploratory surgery. Stripped of artifice under the artificial halo, these were most definitely the medical products of a medical mind.
The devices had a lifelike anatomical correctness and their applications to bodily functions were directly described. They were electrical appliances and there was an understanding that the staff would be at ease going through the operator’s manual with a customer or discussing the relative merits of various finishes. There was no embarrassment, no sideways glances and no schoolboys on a dare. In this shop, a spade was called a cl*t teaser.
It’s not quite as picturesque as the Napa Valley but a trip to the Beijing Erguotou Factory on the outskirts of the capital does include tastings. One production line pumps out 70,000 bottles of baiju a day and the factory employs about 1,400 people. The average worker is paid around 3,000 yuan a month and the liquor is packaged in special bottles just for the suburb of Changping. Employees work eight hours a day, five days a week, but some overtime is required during peak periods. Check www.chinesecultureclub.org for tours.
Harbin’s Siberian tiger park offers visitors the chance to not only see a big cat up close but also the option of paying to watch it feed on other live animals. At least it did about five years ago. I think one of the tigers was called Air Jordan for his/her ability to intercept chickens. Anyway, the price list for the animals is transcribed below. In retrospect, “cow” should really be “calf” and the duck seems way overpriced.
* “Hunting for cows” is not my line. Someone once used it to describe shooting down Scud missiles during the first Gulf War.
UPDATE: In 2005, some parks announced they weren’t going to do this anymore.
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Flags warning of “raticide” have been popping up all over the place. This one was on the verge outside the construction site for China Central Television’s new building. Those bluish things are not pebbles.
UPDATE: All but one of the flags have gone from the site but the rat poison is still there.
To distract yourself from the falling US dollar, rising interest rates, falling interest rates, inflation or the fact that there is nothing on TV, try guessing the spot market price of some animals at a Yunnan market. To get you started, a puppy, which is not pictured below, was selling for 30 yuan. Let the puppy be your guide. Send your entries in by April 2. The person closest to the mark (either in puppy multiples, yuan, US dollars or Australian dollars) will win a T-shirt.
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More from Mr Rittenberg:
The Chinese leadership underwent a certain amount of change at the 17th party congress. Younger, enterprising, more open-minded people – two to be exact – were added at the meeting [to the party’s Standing Committee].
The change in the leadership team is not complete in any sense.
You still have the old guard who are quite a powerful presence.
The emergence of this kind of leaders is a very hopeful sign.
They face enormous challenges and progress is not going to be easy.
There are powerful, corrupt officials who are not prepared to give up their corruption without a fight. But they have a problem. They know China must carry through real political reform.
There are people at the top who take this very seriously, meaning that they know that if China cannot carry though political reforms to match economic reforms there are grave dangers.
It’s a matter of it would be nice to do it… but the question is how.
Nobody at the top will argue with this.
Hu Jintao is an ingenious consensus builder who is able to keep very disparate forces together to drive the whole cumbersome machine slowly forward.
The first step in democratising China is democratising the party.
Filed under: travel | Tags: aba prefecture, butchery, car sickness, sichuan, yaks
There is at least one thing an Australian woman traveling with an electric toothbrush has in common with a Tibetan matriarch who has just carved up a yak – susceptibility to car sickness.
In this part of Sichuan, where the air is thin and the roads just an idea, going just a short distance in a bus with two wrapped slabs of fresh bovine flesh can make anyone green around the gills.
The bus and the rest of its passengers were on official business in the Munigou nature reserve and the Tibetan woman and her family had just finished packaging the yak into portable blocks. The yak had died a kilometer or so inside the reserve among its pristine emerald waters and aquatic wildflowers, which was scenic for the animal but presented some problems for those keen to get at its flesh.
Most of the beast had already been wedged into packs and sent back home on the back of a robust horse and a tipsy two-stroke Honda motorbike when the bus driver offered the woman a trip back into town. She was dressed from head to toe in silver bracelets and dark blue, 1,000-count cotton and was carrying the last two saddle packs of meat.
She accepted but said little else on the trip down except for “Here’s good!” when she got where she needed to go. The bus driver said the woman was probably car sick. He then turned his attention to using a pack of tissues to mop up the rivulets of escaped yak blood running riot over the vehicle’s floor.
Munigou is – or at least was – a fair way from anywhere in a particularly heavily populated province. It’s part of Aba prefecture in Sichuan’s northwest, which is close to the Qinghai border and home to 450,000 ethnic Tibetans.
Tourism authorities insist on calling it a fairyland but this a region where the landscape can kill. On the way to the reserve, the guide pointed to an unremarkable valley where an earthquake in 1933 brought down a mountainside and buried a town of 3,000 people. That place is now a lake.
