Aspirin -- any day

It's truly the wild wild west out here in Beijing ... on the way from the office to the cafe @ lunch today, (a 2 minute walk) I passed 5 brothels (different ones from yesterday -- this time masked as tobacconists not beauty parlours); 100+ men on sitting bicycles looking for labouring work; 12 or so people crouched by the side of the road bending wire, cleaning spark plugs, fixing lamps etc. someone tried selling me a 'fox pelt' ... read for that dalmation skin; someone else tried selling me a 6 inch long dried caterpillar taken from a brown paperbag containing @ least 500 other caterpillars of assorted sizes and markings; someone else tried selling me a bear claw (now this WAS shocking) ... very real inc.shin and some knee cap (his bag had c. 20 other assorted bear claws in it) ... and yet another person tried selling me the moth eaten furry penis of some large cat (tiger I think by the faded markings).

And all i wanted was a cheese sandwich!

I MUST remember my camera tomorrow … bit risky taking pix of this lot as it’s EXCEPTIONALLY illegal. (A pint if you can guess what's in the jar ... mouseover the pic for the answer). The word EXCEPTIONALLY was expressed by a colleague who normally does not bat an eyelid @ these sorts of goings on … so it must be fairly illegal I’d say.

Most of the above is used for medicine BTW. Ground bear claw & arrowroot combined and made into a weak tea is good for reducing fevers of course. C’mon, you knew that. As someone said today “who in hell found that out?”.

Anyway do I look that ill that I need bear claw?

Do i?

I might do … I had a dose of the type of Chinese honesty Joss was writing about the other day. I re-introduced myself to a Chinese colleague today – she’d not seen me in ten weeks or so & all Gweilos look alike (I give her that) … but she totally failed to recognise me. We exchange about 6 emails a day – so I reminded her who I was.

Her reply was “Oh sorry Mark – I did not recognise you. You look much older than when I saw you last”. Thanks Sharon (Sharon rudeword for surname) … I’ll blog about Chinese names one day … typically a quaint mix of Edwardian for a given name (Winston; Winnie; Fannie etc) suffixed by the some of the most anglo-saxon rude names possible. Fantastic. Too rude some of them for this blog .. email me if you want a few examples.

Here's Wiki on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and the use of endangered species:

The use of endangered species is controversial within TCM. In particular, is the belief that tiger penis and rhinoceros horn are aphrodisiacs. Some believe that this is depleting these species in the wild. (DOH NO KIDDING!)

The animal rights movement notes that a few traditional Chinese medicinal solutions use bear bile. To extract maximum amounts of the bile, the bears are often fitted with a sort of permanent catheter. The treatment itself and especially the extraction of the bile is very painful, causes damage to the intestines of the bear, and often even kills the bears. However, due to international attention on the issues surrounding its harvesting, bile is now rarely used by practitioners outside of China.