Chinese Doctor, Kuan Tan

In the midst of our hardcore shopping mission today we managed to pop over to the Chinese doctors. Last time I was here, it was over 5 years ago... my aunt took me here on my mothers orders and she translated my epidemiological issues to the old man sitting behind a big wooden desk in a cold, dark walled room, covered with photos of University degrees and framed certificates. He asks vague questions about what is wrong with me externally and takes my pulse...while he's chatting away to my mum, my eyes gaze around the room. I notice a small TV monitor on his desk. I can see my brother and aunt on the screen, showing them waiting in the shop... looking at various 'wonder cures' which adorn the shop.

After taking my pulse, he takes a up a pen sitting at the front of his desk, held up-right in it's pen rest, dips it into one ink well, then the other. He pauses momentarily, with the pen poised above the white and red-lined prescription paper. With a flourish of his hand stroke, he writes my prescription. Each stroke is beautifully written, with the pen held just like we were taught in calligraphy class at Chinese school. Each stroke was perfectly and expertly placed. When he'd finished, it looked like a work of art.

He'd prescribed me enough for 4 days, while they concoct the rest of my prescription. Instead of the usual bag of herbs (it looks like organised compost material) that I take away and boil for hours, they now give me a concentrated liquid dosage and some weird plastic capsules... which is much less hassle that the method I'm used to.

We come out of the consultancy room, to find my aunt and brother looking at some weird 'cure-all' miracle thing, some kind of fungus which infects caterpillars which usually burrow into the ground to metamorphise...But the fungus kills them and uses the energy from breaking down said caterpillar to help it to grow. So, in then end you get some fungus which has filled the space of a caterpillar that it killed and some shoot growing where the head would have been... Lovely! Anyway, it cures everything and makes you live longer. Poor little caterpillar.