My wife and I decided to ride our bikes around the city today. We wanted a bit of exercise and to explore the parts of the city we had not yet been to. We expected a relatively typical day and things ended up that way, at least from the perspective of someone living in China, it turns out. When telling a friend (who has not been to China) about my day, I realized that I have gotten used to scenes which may be considered very unusual to others. While it was just another day for my wife and I in China, it did have reptiles being sold as aphrodisiacs, BBQ salespeople dancing to techno music while wearing pig and monkey masks and a criminal being led into a police station wearing a thin, black plastic bag on his head.
About 5 minutes from our place we came upon a fair, or carnival, of sorts. It was being held outside in a small empty lot. It was a strange smattering of items including teas, women's underwear, reptiles being sold for medicinal purposes and viagra substitutes, dried fruits, a Taiwanese health drink (which looked and tasted suspiciously like Kool-Aid), a flower which was being hailed as a panacea for all health concerns and "genuine" bear-fur blankets.
In the center of it all was a snack area which had for sale barbecued lamb and beef, fried whole crabs, oysters on the half shell, stinky tofu (which stunk up the whole place, but yet is very tasty) and a sour noodle soup. Across from each other were two separate vendors selling BBQ, both of whom were playing music very loudly and wearing masks. One guy was wearing the pig mask (in the picture above: he is pausing from his barbecuing and dancing to take a drag off his cigarette) and the other was wearing a monkey mask. It took me a couple minutes before I realized that they were two characters from the Chinese literary classic "Journey to the West" (西游记). They were having some sort of dance-off/cook-off.
The second picture above is of the items being sold by one of the vendors. There are snakes, a large turtle, piles of snake heads and actual snake oil. In the words of the vendor, "Long before there was Viagra, China had snake's blood!" Just next to this stand was a camel and two peacocks. The camel's nose was tied to a ladder and the peacocks legs were tied to platforms on either side of a porch swing. It cost 10 RMB (About $1.67) to take a picture on the camel or between the peacocks.
After leaving the fair, we rode through a bumpy dirt rode and came out upon a relatively quiet area which had two very large gated houses with yards. This was the first time I had seen such large houses outside of large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai and certainly the first time I had seen yards. The houses were relatively very large (maybe upper-middle class sized in the US) and had security cameras. Clearly, these houses were owned by local officials or big-shots of some sort. Looking more carefully, I could clearly see paint peeling off, weather stains and mold growth. In fact, upon further inspection, both houses seemed uninhabited. This is not uncommon in China where there are often entire apartment complexes with hundreds of unused apartments. It is an eerie thing to see a such a mini ghost town. Because the Chinese government limits with how much money its citizens can take out of the country, bank account's interest rates are kept artificially low and the stock market has performed dismally for the past few years, many Chinese people have poured their savings into owning apartments which they never use. Unfortunately for them, most of these are shoddily built and the government owns all of the actual land underneath.
On the way home we passed the local public security bureau. We stopped in front of it so I could look up in my dictionary a Chinese character I was unfamiliar with. Suddenly a white, windowless van pulled up and, out of the side door, two policemen escorted a handcuffed man out of the van and into the station. Strangely, the man's head was covered by a thin, black, tiny plastic bag. It is the type of bag that vegetable vendors usually put vegetables in, but not the heavy veggies, as they will rip through the bag. It was so thin, in fact, that it was clear that the man could see through it. There was a light wind, which threatened to blow the bag off and reveal the man's face (of which the small bag barely covered). One policeman was constantly occupied with keeping the bag in place. The man disappeared into a back room and a group of policemen sat and smoked cigarettes.
I suppose this isn't a completely typical day for us here in China, but I didn't think of it as a day any more unusual than the others. I guess, to those who have not been to China, reptile aphrodiasiac peddlers, pig-masked humans barbecuing lamb and beef while smoking, and criminals with small plastic baggies over their heads might be worthy of raised eyebrows. It's amazing what we can get desensitized to.
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