Inspiring clothing, interesting food, an X-rated window seat and the Chinese black market

Everytime I go to China I am always amazed or in awe of something or just reminded of how different another country is. I was in China a few weeks ago and saw more characteristically intriguing things. The next few are nothing surprising.
The hoodie on the left proclaiming "You look happy when Friday is here". Yep, that's right, Fridays are the best of the 5 days of the working week. Comforting to have it on a tshirt and that on a global scale Fridays are appreciated.
The tshirt combo on the right with writing taken from lyrics of a Cardigan's song "Do You Believe" (notably covered by Deftones...). Nice to see SMS style abbreviations being used on mainstream clothes too. And nice to see that languages that don't use Roman characters can pick out beautiful, important words (like HAPPY, FRIDAY, LOVE, SAVE, SOUL), not know/understand/care about the meaning and not really care about how these words are displayed. I hope Asian countries like the way that we Westerners use their symbolic writing on our tshirts and sweatshirts too.


I got this as a present. For a start it wasn't blueberries. I got my camera out to take a picture of these "blueberries". They were small and blue, but they had a pip. Like they were tiny plums. Like damsons maybe. Anyway, they were very delicious, so I wasn't too disappointed about them not being blueberries.
But on the right is a picture of the back of the packet.
"No preservatives" and "No artificial colours" is good. But "no bleach". What have I been eating in China? Is bleach a regular feature of food?


I experienced a lot of first tastes of certain food in China. Snails, frogs, chicken feet, snake, crocodile...etc.
This time in one meal I managed to cross off two more delicacies from the list; fat from frog Fallopian tubes (commonly called hashima) and camel. On the left is a picture of the camel meat. It was actually pretty slimy. It tasted like the gristely, greyish bits of a pork. I didn't like it too much. The hashima (cometimes called hasma) was amazing. I didn't quite know what it was. My girlfriend tried to explain it, but I didn't understand. It was only later that I translated it properly and actually couldn't believe that I had just eaten it. I couldn't take a picture cos it was too late, we had eaten it, and couldn't order another as there wasn't anymore in the restaurant! But fat from a frog's fallopian tube. Mmmm. Lovely.

I also saw my first, real-life fake apple store. This is in Changping (常平) near to Dongguan (东莞).















I love getting window seats on planes. I constantly stare out in amazement at travelling 30,000 feet above the earth, marvelling at pretty much everything below me. I am on the lookout as well for strange on-purpose/random natural occurrences. Dog shaped road networks. Famous buildings. Well-know landmarks. Penis shaped landmasses.

I took this video walking in the street in Changping (常平). To a person with a limited understanding of Chinese, it just seems like graffiti on wall advertising some things. You can see adverts for second hand cars. But delving deeper, there is also an advert for a gun....(on the wall just after I walk past the back van). This was shocking.

But still there were more sinister things in this video. After showing this video to a few more Chinese people, who translated more of the things for me; one bit of scrawling reveals that one person is selling date-rape drugs and another guy is selling fake documents - passports, IDs, etc. Wow, scary how openly they advertise this. I was told that people can get away with this as the local police don't seem to care or do much about this. They have other things to combat, like bribery and corruption and prostitution. Maybe even laziness...

This is a video I took in Guangzhou (广州)  of a suspected criminals arrest. Notice the guys holding the suspect down. Apparently the guy on the ground was a thief. In Guangzhou, especially during this time of year (Chinese New Year) there is a high amount of people - too much for the local police force to manage. So there is a private security firm that is allowed to patrol the streets and stop anything that they think is wrong. The problem however is that this private security firm has no power or no authority or proper training, so they just use excessive force against pretty much anyone. Like I watched as about 8 of these security men chased down 3 illegal street vendors; 2 males and one female. 1 male and 1 female got away and one poor guy got hunted down as he attempted to frantically drag him and his cart to freedom. I don't know if he made it. But 8 vs 1....I doubt it.

Many of the people in the city don't like this private secuirty team imposing their own take on public order and sometimes get some bad press in the media for their general, plastic-police style, heavy-handed law enforcement. To a foreigner, there doesn't seem to be much wrong; they're just doing their job. I don't fancy being robbed, and if I was, I would be quite grateful for someone chasing the perp down.

But as you can see from the video, a crowd of around 50 people had gathered within 30 seconds just to watch them catch a suspected thief - some of them you can see openly filming this spectacle - probably not filming it out of curiosity, but more in the hope that some punches and maybe a glimpse of some primitive handling and scandalous actions would unfold.