Ari's Planet

Woohoo! I did it! I found cough drops in China! I'm like the most amazing tourist to ever walk the Great Wall, gawk at the Terracotta Warriors, or hack his way through a fog of smoke in Xian. Yes, Ari totally rocks. Ari figures that if there's no one around to pat him on the back, that shouldn't stop him and he'll do it himself, why thank you.

Did I talk about my experience of trying to get a cough drop in China? They haven't heard of palliative remedies for colds. If you walk in and say you have typical cold symptoms, the first things they give you are antibiotics and random Chinese herbs of unknown composition. No history, no exam, just cheap drugs. The quality of any drug in China is pretty suspect. I have been in several pharmacies, saw a Chinese doctor with an interpreter, but the Chinese have not heard of cough drops. Apparently, not even of the active ingredient, menthol, a pretty standard thing in the West. There may be an equivalent in China, but for the life of me I couldn't communicate it. The LP phrasebook doesn't have "drop" or "lozenge" or "menthol" in there. Not until I walked down Yanta Lu (Yanta St.) in Xian and happened to see a "pharmacy superstore". I went in and was immediately surrounded by 5 pharmacists, all of whom didn't speak a word of English. By sheer luck, one of the first aisles happened to have cough drops. Possibly no menthol, but manitol sugar substitute is close enough. A pharmacist even produced a box of Tylenol cold, of which I had all the components (or equivalents) except for the cough suppressant. I made off with a few small boxes of cough drops and kept the Tylenol cold in reserve.

My walk down Yanta Lu started with a search for an external disk drive. As you may have figured out by now, I take a lot of photographs. My 56GB of flash memory is enough for about 20 days of typical shooting, then I need to offload images. My plan was to backup to a portable hard drive, burn two sets of DVDs, mail one set home, then wipe the CF cards as needed. Finding a computer that would let me burn a DVD, even though I brought a good portable DVD burner with me, has proven quite difficult. So I decided to try to buy a small portable disk drive, copy my images over, then fedex the drive home, where it would be copied to another disk drive and possibly burned to DVD. I would keep the jpegs and wipe the raw files to clear space off my main hard drive. This would also save hours of DVD burning and searching for a place to do the burning at the cost of the hard drive and fedex fees.

I began my quest at a store by the drum tower in Xian. A hard drive there cost about $120 for an 80GB disk, really overpriced. A search online for Xian and electronics amazingly yielded several stores, three of which happened to be on Yanta Lu, which was only a couple of kilometers from my hostel. Off I went in the pouring rain that came to Xian. I felt much better walking in the rain, as it helped remove some of the disgusting crud that passes for air most of the time here. Along the impressive old walls next to the wide and deep moat. Past a department store, which could pass for one in the US. Past a pretty decent camping equipment store (if you need such, now I know where there is one in Xian, they had Garmont boots and other gear). Past a little bakery with whole-wheat nut bread. Past a whole bunch of little shops for Canon, Epson, Lenovo, etc., which had already closed by 18:00. Finally, the last store, in the basement, looked like a good place. Lots of random computer parts. Very hard to explain "disk drive" "HD", etc. to Chinese, they just don't know a word of English. But sitting in one of the display cases was a disk, only it was locked, since they had just closed. I managed to, tortuosly, extract a capacity (80GB), price (475 RMB), open hours (09:00-18:00), and got a business card so I can get a taxi there when they're open. I'm sure the price is a bit high, will try to negotiate it down a bit, but still much better than the 800 RMB the other place wanted for a similar Lenovo-branded item.

In other adventures, I posted a few packages home. The packaging service at Xian post office is amazing. Really. The guy cut boxes down to size, stuffed things in perfectly, taped and taped and heat sealed. Three boxes for 23 RMB. I have no idea why the lady at the international counter, after measuring the package sizes, gave me one type of declaration form for the longer box and another for the small box. Two items went by surface mail and another by airmail. Mailing is expensive and is becoming a bit of a cost for this trip.

The rain helped clinch my theory of my misery. Yes, the poor air quality really is making me feel sick. I already have a cold that's hanging around in my sinuses. Not terrible, and I have doxycycline if it hangs around too much longer. Today, after the rain, was the first time I felt like walking again. Keep in mind that the air is still really dirty, just a bit less so. The leaves knocked from the trees and the wet sidewalks reminded me of Fall in the US. I was feeling pretty good until several folks sat nearby in the restaurant and started smoking. Oh crap, wow did my throat and lungs and eyes start complaining fast. Their smoking subsided while they ate and I escaped before they finished their meal and got back to smoking. A great suggestion in a reply to my post on the LP forums about finding places in China with less pollution was to check the visibility at a city on a weather website, as visibility is a proxy for air pollution; low visibility means a lot of particulates, unless the visibility is reduced due to water (vapor, rain, snow).

One benefit of this stupid cold is it got me over my silly Western aversion to spitting. There's nothing like a nice big goblet of spit launched at high-velocity at the sidewalk. I still spit with a terrible accent. No proper throat clearing. Avoiding indoor spitting. Checking that I don't hit any pedestrians. But if I can get the pronunciation of toilet (cesuo) and figure out how much something costs I think I'll be half way on my way to not being even close to being a native, yet so much closer than when I hopped off the train to Beijing.