What Everyone Asks About China
- At June 02, 2017
- By Roxanne Snopek
- In Life, Roxanne Writes On
- 2
What everyone asks about China…
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:
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?
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.
“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:
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:
“… 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.”
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.
Life isn’t a box of chocolates, my friend. It’s a very large bag of cherries.
♥
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On Krispy Kremes and Enjoying the Moment
So yesterday afternoon, while I was diligently working away at my desk, out of the corner of my eye I saw a group of young people walk past my window. Before the Krispy Kreme FUNdraiser banner had fully registered in my brain, I was out of my chair, grabbing for my purse. Kids! Selling food! For a Good Cause! Surely I had some cash here somewhere.
I yanked open the door before they even rang the bell. Poor guys. Assaulted on the front porch by an unwashed writer who hadn’t eaten all day and several dogs determined to protect her, from what, they knew not.
I didn’t even hear what they were raising funds for. All I heard was “$10 for a dozen” which is exactly what I had.
I brought the box into the kitchen and opened the lid. Twelve of them, round, glistening and golden like the sun.
And then there were ten.
As I licked the glaze off my fingers, it occurred to me that I might be in trouble. It was very quiet in the house. D3, the only one of our chicks still in the nest, was napping off final exam stress in her room. Hubby was still at work and currently on a health-and-fitness kick, which meant he was unlikely to help out anyway.
So. It was just me and them.
I’d like to mention that I’m not even a huge Krispy Kreme fan. Sour-cream glazed from Tim Horton’s are my true favorites. Nevertheless, my-oh-my did these hit the spot.
By evening, we were down to seven, then six, then four. I can’t say how it all went down, only that D3 raised quite the clamor upon her reanimation and immediately set about catching up. When hubby got home from work, he and I went for a walk, which allowed him to bend his dietary rules. Since I walked too, I also partook. (The walk probably burned off calories equivalent to two bites, but never mind that.)
Then the Vancouver Canucks got knocked out of the playoffs, so I needed some comfort. There were two and a half donuts left in the box. Who leaves a half-donut just sitting there?? Not me, I’ll tell you that.
When I got up this morning, the last two were still there, old, lonely but still decent looking.
Naturally I identified with them and felt they deserved a dignified end to their stay with us.
It may not have been my best decision to date. I feel enough shame to keep me from doing this again for a good, long time. But not so much that I won’t share the story, or remember it with pleasure.
Which, when it comes to shame, is the perfect amount.
It Made Sense In My Mind
- At September 04, 2014
- By Roxanne Snopek
- In Life, Roxanne Writes On
- 0
So I was at the oral surgeon’s today with our youngest daughter. Lucky gal has three un-erupted wisdom teeth that will need extracting. Yikes. Anyway, after the intro given by the lovely nurse, the doc comes in, all wild-eyed and Superman-ish. We’ve known him for many years; he used to be our neighbor. I really like him, but he’s a little scary.
“Well, that was fun,” he says, sliding into his chair like it was home base.
I look expectantly at him, unsure how to respond. Is he mad? Is he having a bad day? Do I want to know, in either case??
“90-year old lady,” he explains. “Alzheimer’s. Needs all her teeth pulled.”
“Ah,” I said. (I’m a real conversationalist.) We’d passed the lady in the waiting room. Poor thing was definitely unhappy and confused.
“Won’t do it though,” he continued, looking between us as he prepared the punchline. “Mouthful of rotten teeth and she refuses treatment.”
“Why?” we asked obediently.
“Because her teeth made her go blind.”
Daughter and I look at each other.
“What?”
“That’s right. Says her teeth made her go blind. Adamant about it. Had to tell me the whole story.” He shook his head. “Some days.”
“You’d think,” I said, “that she’d WANT to have her teeth out, since they made her go blind.”
You know. She’s got Alzheimer’s. Her reality, and all. My daughter understood me.
Doc Superman did not.
“The teeth didn’t make her go blind,” he explained. “The dementia did that.”
We stuck to the business of wisdom teeth after that.