I spent a great day with my friend Meripet a few days ago – shopping again. I think I've shopped more in two days than I usually shop in a whole year. But I'm looking for a dress for a friend's wedding, and it's best to do that here rather than in the three days after I arrive home and before the wedding while recovering from jetlag. And I found the dress. And two other shirts. But the shirts were about $3 each, so that's awesome.
After dress shopping, Meripet and I headed to the Ughyur market to look for shoes. She told me you can find guys on the street selling shoes for about $5 a pair. That sounds like a steal to me. So we headed back to the area near the university where I was walking with Nigar. More throngs of people and men shouting "Besh kuai, besh kuai, besh kuai!" "Besh" is apparently five in Ughyur, and "kuai" is the monetary equivalent to buck. Just about everything is five yuan, which is about 80 cents. Also awesome.
We cut around a corner away from the busy market street and down a side alley with a bunch of food vendors and ended up in a Ughyur medicine shop. Meripet thought they might have a particular tea I bought last year in Kashgar. She started talking with the guy and explaining what I was looking for, and he said he knew and started putting together tea and rose and saffron into a giant metal urn that he ground with an equivalently giant metal pestle. I think that gets used to grind everything in the shop from flattened lizards to bull testicles, so it'll be interesting to see what this "tea" tastes like and what it does. I wonder if it could be mildly hallucinogenic just from the contact with other weird ingredients. Unfortunately, the subtle hints of rose and saffron are a little overpowered by the trace contact with cloves, but it was the experience that counts most. After pouring the strongly scented fine powder into a sheet of paper from a Ughyur magazine and folding it up into a neat little triangular package, he and Meripet started to talk about her health. I sat watching with interest, precariously perched on a tiny stool next to a bucket of writhing, fighting, and generally pissed off live scorpions. Apparently they're a good remedy for arthritis. The guy was explaining to Meripet her early onset anemia, etc and then asked if I would like to have my medical conditions read. Sure, why not? So I moved to the stool across the doctor's table, and he took my wrist in his hand, fingers over my pulse, inspecting my nails. He's looking me over for a while and then said that I have back pain during my monthly cycle. Um, not so much, but I keep listening. Then he says that my appetite isn't so good. This is pretty true. It comes and goes, and some weeks I am completely ravenous all of the time. Most of the time I eat little bits of a lot of things, but I'm never really hungry enough to sit and mow through something. So I'm still listening (all through Meripet's translation), and he said that I have trouble sleeping at night. But in particular he said that it's because I have trouble turning off my mind. He said that I think too much in my sleep. I do have some of the absolutely strangest dreams. At this point, I asked Meripet to ask him what it is that he sees in me that allows him to say these things. In some ways it's like going to a "psychic", but I do think that they are just really observant men who pay attention to the tone of your skin, the health of your hair and nails, the circles and spots on your face, and they read all of those little signs that something's not settled.
And then he said that my "womb is cold". I'm still not entirely sure what that means. Meripet tried to explain, but I think it's one of those cultural and language things that may have no direct translation. It isn't a specific temperature cold, but it isn't a metaphysical cold. He said I should have no trouble having children, but I would still like to know what a "cold womb" means. Apparently it has something to do with me being "out of balance", and I have to change my diet to eat more "hot" foods to warm it up. Apparently coffee and fried things are considered "hot". Mmmm, fried chicken…
After leaving the kind doctor to his curled up dried snakes and starfishes, we continued down the street, turned on another block to buy meat on sticks (kebab on real sticks – as in tree branches) and up another street to a really big herbal medicine shop. This place was like the Costco of herbal medicine. They had everything – herbs, minerals, corals, teas, lizards, snakes, turtle shells, starfish, seahorses, flowers, roots, tree sap, etc etc etc. And in HUGE jars and bins. I wandered the room asking "what is this? What is this?" and came upon a small table stacked with reindeer antlers. Very sad, because those reindeer aren't running around in the wild now with no antlers. They're not running around at all. Next to the gray fuzzy antlers were three half-liter bottles of a gray liquid that looked like powdered reindeer antler - until I went to pick up the bottle. I was expecting the bottle to weigh the same as a bottle of water, so it was roughly the same experience as taking a step down and realizing it's a little further than you'd estimated. The bottle weighed a ton. I had to put it down the inch I'd managed to lift it and try again with both hands. Mercury. Great. I picked up a half- liter bottle of pure liquid mercury. I said "this is toxic" and they guy said "no, the toxin has been taken out." Okay. Mercury is an element. And mercury is toxic. So how exactly does one take the toxin out of mercury? I mean, I understand that liquid mercury is "less toxic" than mercury vapor, but it's still a little unsettling when you realize you're holding about a thousand thermometers' worth of the stuff.
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