dirty bird doctor

An experience I definitely don't recommend is going to a Chinese doctor. I needed to go the other day (Mom, I'm fine, don't have a heart attack) and it was not in my top 100 most fun things ever.

Obviously that's a thing I needed a Chinese person to accompany me for. Unfortunately, about 20 of our 25 Chinese TAs at my school left at the end of last weekend to go back to university in Changchun. The ones that are left are all people I'm not exceptionally close to, at all. My Chinese friends outside of them are my students (who I didn't want to take) and males (who I also didn't want to take). I looked at the schedule, sucked it up and asked one of the girls that seemed the most relaxed to go with me on a morning I knew she didn't have to work.

There are a zillion hospitals and clinics here; generally unless you have a cold, you need to go to a hospital. I asked a friend for a recommendation, so we went to the hospital for the oil company (the "Oil Hospital"). You never make an appointment to see a doctor here, and you don't use your insurance either (not sure why I have an international health insurance policy at this point...).

When you walk in, you go to the registration desk, tell them your name, age and the department that you need. They give you a small booklet, which serves as your chart. They have no permanent record system and they don't ask for any id or even your last name. After that, you take your "chart" to the checkout counter and pay for it (three yuan). Then you go up to whatever department you need and wait to have your initial checkup.

chart!

checkout counter

Initial checkup equals you and whoever else feels like wandering in talking to a doctor/nurse/who knows? and describing what's wrong in a room with other people doing the same. Then they tell you what you need to do (e.g. tests, actual physical exam, etc.), print out something saying as much and you take that down to the checkout, pay again (my exam was 20 yuan) and bring your receipt back up for whatever you need. If you have an exam and then need some tests like I did, you get a printout, go pay (three different lab tests came to 195 yuan) and do some more running around. There also seemed to only be maybe one or two hospital staff working each department. And this was a big hospital.

As far as cleanliness and privacy go, forget about it. For any tests, you carry the samples around yourself. I definitely saw people wandering around with slides smeared with bodily fluids on them completely uncovered, so that if they fell or bumped into you, whatever was on their slide would get on you. Ick. The whole place was dirty, per China standards, and don't even think about going in the bathroom. Which naturally had no soap. Or tissue. In retrospect, I'm honestly not even sure that my exam doctor wore gloves.

The exam rooms are lockable, but nobody really does lock them, and when the doctor goes in or out, they just leave the doors open. I saw more than a few strangers' downstairs mixups (yes, that is a Might Boosh reference).

I ended up with two prescriptions (no pills, apparently they hate the easy way of doing things), that cost me 295 yuan. Once they explained everything, I definitely knew I didn't need nearly as much as they gave me, but whatever.

So that was that. Hopefully there will be no rinse and repeat in this case.

fortune teller

I was out to dinner a few weeks ago with a group of student from my Oil Adults 2 class, and one of them mentioned that she was wearing an amulet from a fortune teller (can't for the life of me recall how this came up). Apparently if something bad is going on in your life, a fortune teller will write you a good luck charm that you tie into your underwear and wear around every day. Naturally what with this being such a foreign concept, I wanted to go so my student took me earlier this week.

The fortune teller works out of her home. She has been doing this many, many years now and is known for it in the community. All of her clients find her by word of mouth and she is quite busy.

My student translated for me and took notes in Chinese so I could have someone else re-translate for me later if I wanted. The fortune teller asked my birthday (lunar) and the time I was born. I had to ballpark on the time (morning?) and I may have completely made that up, so who know how much that screwed the pooch on my fortune. I don't really believe in the whole deal anyway, so I'm not too worried about it anyway, I just wanted to do it for the experience.

After she calculated my lunar birthday, she just ran through my life chronologically. She asked what I wanted to know about and I said my career, my student also threw in a bunch of questions about my personal life as well for good measure.

The gist of it is as follows... the next two years are going to be kind of crappy. Not super terrible, not bad enough for her to write me an amulet, but not good. In two years I will marry a man that is tall and most likely foreign, maybe Chinese. He will be very successful in business or maybe in the government. It won't be anyone I know now. We will have two children, a boy and a girl. 

In two years I will also experience a turning point (one could infer that this will be the whole marriage thing but who knows). After that, life will be great, I'll have a career in technology and will be very successful. Nothing too crazy or notable throughout, just an overall good life. If I stay out of the US it will be even better.

I asked about my parents and my brother and had to give their birthdays as well. Got some good and bad details there. Nothing crazy surprising.

My student also had her fortune told. The most I caught there was that she will have a child (a boy) at 43. She is currently in her late 30's and already has an eight year old daughter.

The whole time we were there, other people were in the room. A woman that I'm assuming was the fortune teller's daughter was in the room and then another woman that must have been her next appointment joined as well. I asked my student about the lack of privacy on the way out, and she said that the Chinese think that since they don't know the other people they don't care what people hear about them.

The whole thing was pretty cheap, only 30 yuan. The cost depends on what you ask and what they do; it can be upwards of 150 yuan. I might go again to another fortune teller that reads tea leaves or coins, we'll see. Overall the whole thing wasn't very impressive.

playing outside & street markets

Now that the weather is warming up, people are getting outside a lot more. You can see big groups of people congregating everywhere. Kids play games, old men sit around and play cards, old women play mah jong, people dance, companies have meetings outside, it's great!

The street markets are open now as well. These are a great place to see all kinds of awesomeness. There are day markets and night markets. The night markets are kind of ridiculous because they are not very well lit, so you really can't see what you're buying, but you can hang around them and have a beer. Both day and night essentially have the same stuff. Booths with clothing, food and utter randomness. From booth to booth there is a lot of the same stuff, a lot of designer knock off stuff and a lot of stuff with terrible English. I'm always on a mission to find the worst possible English. Everything at the markets is super cheap, but you have to haggle. The vendors tend to love haggling with foreigners, so it's a lot of fun.

One thing at the markets that just makes me sad is the boxes of chicks. Men dye baby chicks to make them cute so people want to buy the for pets. When you buy a chick, they put it in a small plastic bag for you, just like any other purchase. Even when you can't see the chicks, you can hear them cheeping from far away. One of the other foreigners in town saw a child buy a chick last week and immediately use the bag to beat it against the ground and kill it.

random pix: China wtf

Through that gate area is my apartment... and while Songyuan is a small town, it is NOT this country.

This is for a hair salon...

Recently got served this banner ad...

fun with food

This has been a good week for food experimentation so far. I tried some crazy stuff at a barbeque place, made plans to eat dog with a student and found out where I can eat brains! Now I just need to find someone to go with me...

I'm definitely discovering that barbeque places are the best for finding interesting and crazy foods. I went to one in dong bei for lunch yesterday with a Chinese friend. Dong bei (which literally means east north) refers to the area of town across the river that seems to be a more low income area. Dong bei is where the the Long Hua Temple and the traditional restaurant where I ate donkey are located.

At Chinese barbeque places, the majority of the food you order comes on small skewers and is grilled. Since the skewers are small, you order a lot of different ones for a full meal. The restaurant yesterday was tiny, not really clean and lacking in the little things (hot peppers to put on your food, napkins, quick service, etc.) but as far as main dishes go, it had a great selection. They had the standard meats: chicken beef, lamb, different kinds of seafood, etc. Also the standards extras, tofu wrapped greens, bacon wrapped mushrooms, plain mushrooms, plain tofu, etc.

They also had pigeon, which I ate, heart and all, and pig tails, which I saved for next time. I discovered at the traditional dong bei restaurant that if you only order experimental food, you'll likely end up with nothing you really want to eat. My Chinese friend was grossed out that I ate the pigeon's heart, but he's pretty western Chinese.

pigtails

pigeon

pigeon heart