Sickness

I've had a few bouts of sickness while here in China - often directly related to a new and interesting food... but for the past week I've had a bad chest cold, complete with stuffy nose, body-ache, head-ache, coughing, and all that good stuff.

I have learned something from this experience, though.... if ever in your life you find yourself debating between taking traditional Chinese medicine, and western Medicine......

Take The Western Meds.

Chinese medicine is, at best, herbal tea. At worst it's something along the line of dried tiger-penis jerkey with a big glass of snake-blood liquor.

You see, the Chinese describe illnesses as inner "heat" and/or inner "cold" If you're too much of one or the other, many bad things happen. For instance, pimples are a result of excess heat, as is a swollen throat, among many others. This is not a literal heat, mind you, but a metaphorical pre-germ theory explanation of disease. Plant (and sometimes animal) products (medicine) are administered in certain doses in semi-alchemical attempts to bring the "inner heat" under control.

But the Rhinovirus family cares little for metaphorical mysticism.

After a week of coping, not being able to talk (and thereby showing "Ratatouille" to my listening classes), and feeling like crap... Nancy presented me with yet another box of what I assumed to be more tiny vials of bitter fluid, or little pills of plants.

Turning it over from it's ever-indecipherable front label, though, I saw what appeared to be a boon from on high: "TYLENOL COLD DM." And the angels rang out in an immaculate chorus. Within one dose, I was feeling much better.

I've had a few run-ins with DM medication, which stands for dextromethorphan. It's is a cough-suppressant agent that functions by acting as a dissociative hallucinogen - meaning it makes the brain feel like the body is less "there." Therefore, the cough reaction isn't triggered nearly as often. And it feels pretty loopy... your eyes even take on the fixed-and-dilated look.

I'm hoping to be off of this medicine by the end of the week. Fun aside, it has some funny side-effects, and certainly makes work a bit more of a hassle.

Oh yesterday, Nancy and I went to the local zoo with her niece named Yiru. She's about 1 and a half years old, and quite adorable. She's just learning to speak (Chinese of course), so I was able to communicate well with her. She hardly spoke to me (weird, white stranger), but we'd developed quite a rapport by the end of our time together. That was the good side of the trip.

The bad side was the zoo itself. What a depressing place. Not so much a zoo as it was simply an animal prison. Bars, cages, boxes... and in many of the exhibits the zoo not only allowed, but profited off of people throwing food at the animals. We were even so "fortunate" as to encounter a group of two dumbasses and their bimbo girlfriends who took perverse pleasure in taunting, teasing, and otherwise annoying the animals. They threw plastic bottles and paper popcorn bags into the monkey exhibit...who knows what kind of harm those may cause.

The level of not just ignorance, but outright idiocy and disrespect toward nature and animals is something that really irks me about China and the Chinese people (not all, of course...just some).

Congratulations, son-of-a-local-official-on-a-power-trip, you bested a monkey. Quite obviously, you know your match when you see it.

But there it is. Between this cold, teaching classes, planning on my parents' imminent arrival in March, and at current having to repeatedly assure Nancy that I really do want to be with her, it's keeping me quite busy.

Now your hand is on my shoulder