do not eat

A lot of things about china get less weird after you live here for a while. Traffic is a good one. Just this week I heard a perfectly sane Canadian man complain that with the new traffic guards his taxi could no longer make illegal and highly dangerous u-turns (I'll write more on this later).

But then after you start to be able to to read Chinese things get a little weirder again.

Like when you are on the grocery store escalator and your hand comes to rest on a small package of candies. To your brief delight you find that you can make out all the characters. Then the horror sets in: Cow Meat Candies.

Then your brain remembers a story told to you by your "been in China too long" boss (here after known as the Ice Cream Monster or Bing Qi Lin Gui). Your brain remembers that he brought a package of these candies back from Shanghai to his coworkers in Beijing, intending it to be a joke. They devoured the candies and thanked him.