Sick with Irony

With the cold dissipating and the laundry dropped off, I finally saw the sun after 5 or 6 days and decided to day-trip it out of Nanchang to the nearby bucolic villages of Luotiancun, Jingtai and Shuinan. They are connected by stone-flagged pathways and seem to be amenable to tourists coming in and peekng their heads in where ever the hell they please. Strangely, there is no 'admission' to the villages and the locals are not out selling their wears. I am not sure what the locals have to gain - maybe it's government subsidized - who knows. The general attraction is the peaceful rural setting of these nearly 1400 year old villages. Hand pumps dot the villages and with locals calming smiling. A few sites are the claimed 1000 year old, still operational, well, the old (restored) waterwheel and 700 year old camphor tree. Personally, I just enjoyed the slow country life and trapsing through the yellow rapeseed fields. Which by the way, I finally figured out is what I have been eating with many of my meals - steamed and rolled in minced cayenne-like peppers (of course everything I order in China is covered in peppers.) It all made for a nice day and several days of dreary weather.

Ok, now the ironic part. So, I'm munching on a bag of 'Lays' potato chips in Shibi waiting for a bus. Twenty-five minutes later I catch the transfer to Nanchang in Anyi. Ten minutes down the road from Anyi, out of nowhere comes this wave of sickness: cold sweats, nausea, etc. WARNING: If you are made easily queezy, skip this paragraph. After several valient efforts to not puke, I lose the battle and desperately fling open the window and let it fly - four times. Being that I am in the very front seat of a bus traveling at 40 mph, I do a hell of a job covering atleast 40-45% of the side of the bus. Naively thinking I had control at this point, 10 minutes out of Nanchang, I hurl three more times. But this time it's those gut wrenching hurls and the wind didn't do me any favors on the last hurl. Once in Nanchang, I get the bus driver to let me off early so I could catch a taxi to my hotel ASAP, and also so I don't have to deal with everyone looking at me and my artistic expression down the side of the bus when we pull into the bus station. I make it to room just in time to deal with the oncoming wave of violent diarrhea. I rest, then deal with wave two, and am now shaking uncontrollably, can't warm up and feel severally dehydrated. Long story short, 6 bottles of water, several ibuprofen and 7 hours later I stuff my face with noodles, fruit and oreos. Thirty minutes later I literally feel 100% fine. I have never had so much violent sickness come and go so quickly. The cause you ask?

I haven't verified this yet, but as I was eating those chips I thought "gee, these sure remind me of those Olean chips I had once about 10 years ago. You know, the ones that gave me bad diarrhea." I remember that on that package it said something along the lines of 70% of consumers suffered from either diarrhea, nausea, etc. I think Olean is a brand name for olestra and is a fairly non-digestable fat and hence more 'healthy'. I am sure it is still around in our food, but I haven't seen potato chip bags advertising it in years. So my hunch is, they made a crap load of this stuff, couldn't sell it to the American market and thus offloaded it on the poor chinese. Ironically, I travel half-way around the world and on a daily basis eat unidentifiable fried animal organs from street vendors and it's the American non-natural export that does me in. Go figure. (BTW: for you language nazis out there, if that is not an actual example of irony, then pipe-down. I never truly understood what was, and what was not, 'irony' in that Alanis Morissette song anyway.)

Feeling ready to go, today was another nice day and I spent the day cruising around Nanchang. Apparently, this city is quite notable for it's role in the communist uprising. But outside the bronze reliefs dedicated to Stalinist efforts and early socialist movements, all I saw was a capitalism feeding frenzy. I walked for hours in some of the busiest streets I have ever stepped foot on with people racing from store to store to store. Similar to Yichang and Guangzhou which I extolled for their lively riverside promenade activities and lush parks, there are several parks and small lakes in the middle of the city that are filled with people mulling about in these little oasises. There was just a slew of activity. I have to give it to the Chinese, no matter where I go, what day it is or what time it is, there is always people doing something whether it be work or pleasure outings. But the neat part is that, every busy city has it's own little flavor separating it apart form the others and I never get bored walking around all day. Tonight I'm taking an overnight sleeper to Hangzhou in Zhejiang province to see if I can meet up with Chong Wang, a student from Zhejiang University who worked with me last summer in the lab trying to bust down the door on some new iron chemistry. Oh, by the way Chong, I will see you tomorrow. I hope you are free.