What everyone asks about China…
The Li River winding through the Karst mountains
Some of you know we recently traveled to China. It was an amazing trip, but I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow because we’ve all lived through slide shows of Uncle Morris’s trip to Wisconsin as a kid.
But I will relate one story.
If you’re… delicate… you may want to give this one a miss. Otherwise, here goes:
Squat Toilets 101. Consider yourself introduced.
Everyone, it seems, is curious about the bathroom situation in China. So yes, we saw squat toilets. Yes, we used squat toilets, yes, we remembered to bring our own TP and yes we managed just fine. I’m also pleased to report that Western “potty” toilets were available in many places. Not the smaller tourist spots, mind you, so, ahem, scheduling is important.
Ah yes, scheduling. You’ll understand me when I say that sitting in an airplane, traveling across time zones, eating different foods at different times, being sleep deprived and experiencing bathroom anxiety can all play havoc with a person’s system. Schedules get disrupted. Sometimes schedules come to a complete halt. You getting me?
The Silver Caves at Yangzhuo – see? Not just about bathrooms.
Now, we’d brought with us a small arsenal of pharmaceuticals, prepared for pain, sprains, coughs, congestion, motion sickness, dry eye, crowd anxiety, what have you. We assumed the worst-case scenario would be an explosive case of food poisoning.
Wrong. In fact, after several days of progressive… sluggishness… I would have welcomed a little salmonella. I finally admitted my distress to one of our travel companions. He’s a doctor. I’ll call him Dave.
Tell me you wouldn’t be rationing fluids, too.
“Dave,” I said. “I have one goal today. It’s the same goal I had yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Can you help me?”
“Sure.” He handed me a packet. “Take this.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s the stuff you take before a colonoscopy. Drink it before bed. It’ll put you right.”
Those of you who’ve had colonoscopies know where this is going.
“Dave,” I said. “It’s bad enough in the privacy of your own home. But while traveling? IN THE LAND OF SQUAT TOILETS?”
“Just take a little,” he said.
Which reminded me of when I went for pregnancy ultrasounds and they were running late and I’d drunk eighteen gallons of water that morning and the nurse, upon seeing my distress, gave me a little medicine cup and said, “Pee out a few tablespoons.”
Except so very much worse.
Declining medical advice, my husband and I took to the streets of Beijing, looking for a convenience store. Surely there’d be some good old Ex-Lax out there somewhere, we thought.
Nope. We ended up in an herbal pharmacy, staffed by people who spoke zero English. We typed the word “constipation” into our English-Chinese translation app and the clerk understood immediately. She sold us a package that looked like this:
Oh, that helps.
With instructions that look like this:
I was using a fabulous little app called Pleca, which works thusly: you hold your phone over the words you need translated and BOOM, you get the English version.
Decoding the translation requires a little effort, because the characters have meanings that depend upon the characters before and after them, so they could mean many things. Here’s a partial snapshot of the box, as translated by Pleca:
My favorite part is the description, in small letters that you probably can’t see:
Write pill? Wha…?
“… for real hot product delay due to consumer lag…”
It’s a lyrical language, isn’t it?
The box contained eight packets filled with tiny red beads.
“Do I eat them?” I asked my husband. “Do I smoke them? Make tea from them?”
“I don’t care,” he said. “We have a two-hour drive to the Great Wall in the morning. This ends now.”
Rafting down the Yulong River was so much fun!
So, I dumped them into a glass of water, shot it back like wormy mezcal, then lay down on the floor next to the bathroom and waited for them to work.
They did not.
But two hours later, as I was imagining the Chinese herbalists enjoying my method acting, and rethinking the colonoscopy prep idea, my dear husband, who’d happened onto a fresh fruit stand, saved the day by plying me with fructose and fiber. Consumer lag ended shortly thereafter and life returned to normal.
I hiked that Great Wall like a spritely rock star.
Life isn’t a box of chocolates, my friend. It’s a very large bag of cherries.
♥
For bonus material, including giveaways, sign up for my newsletter.
The Chocolate Comeback
I’m delighted to announce my latest release, THE CHOCOLATE COMEBACK, part of the Love at the Chocolate Shop multi-author series by Tule Publishing. This is a fish-out-of-water story about a flighty, failed fashion model named DeeDee, a conservative businessman named Isaac and his younger brother, Mark, who has Down syndrome.
This story has struck a chord with readers, who have this to say:
How often does a romance make you cry, make you laugh out loud, make you fall in love with someone? Every real romance does just that, and this story did it for me. These characters are flawed, funny and poignant. Mark Litton is refreshingly real, and the joy that comes with his challenges is rarely written so authentically. I was cheering by the end!”
…a delightful story, filled with humor, love and turmoil as Mark inadvertently brings Isaac and DeeDee together.”
…an engaging, uplifting romance that… tackled such a heavy topic – developmental disabilities – and didn’t sugarcoat the reality of it. We saw both angles, that of the family member and that of an outsider with zero experience joining that family… made me want to be a better person.”
…a beautiful enriching story…”
…exciting, entertaining, and well-written…”
I’m blushing… and thrilled at the response. I hope you enjoy it, too.
Salted Caramel Pecan Treasures
Maddie Cash, the beloved heroine of my latest book, THE CHOCOLATE CURE, adores these delicious bite-sized treats. Each book in the Love at the Chocolate Shop series features a special treat, and as a gift to our readers, we’ve got recipe cards to go along with them! We give them away regularly on our Facebook page, so please visit us there.
In the meantime, here’s the recipe for Maddie’s irresistible treat. Enjoy!
Salted Caramel Pecan Treasures
You’ll need:
Mini-muffin tin plus 24 mini-muffin liners
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup caramels, unwrapped (approx. 45 caramels)
1.5 tablespoons evaporated milk (can substitute milk or heavy cream)
24 whole pecans
Coarse pink Himalayan salt
- Fill mini-muffin tins with mini-cupcake liners.
- Microwave chocolate chips, checking and stirring frequently, until smoothly melted
- Drop 1 tablespoon of melted chocolate into each cupcake liner, reserving ¼ of chocolate in bowl for later. Using pastry brush, paint the melted chocolate onto the bottom and about 2/3 up sides of liners.
- Place chocolate-lined mini-muffin tins in freezer.
- Microwave caramels and evaporated milk, checking and stirring frequently, until smoothly melted.
- Remove muffin tins from freezer. Place one whole pecan in bottom of each cup.
- Pour caramel into chocolate cups until about 2/3 full, covering pecans completely.
- Return tins to freezer for about 5 minutes.
- Use pastry brush to paint remaining melted chocolate onto chilled cups, completely covering the caramel. Sprinkle with pink Himalayan salt while chocolate is still warm.
- Return to freezer for about 30 minutes.
Enjoy!