A Trip to the Pharmacy

Being under the weather in a different country ain't fun.

Scott had a cold earlier this week and passed it along to me. I went looking for throat lozenges and couldn't find any in several different places, so I decided to go to a pharmacy. Now, pharmacies here aren't like CVS or Walgreens in the U.S. They only sell over-the-counter medicine (no magazines, cards, lotion, etc.) and unfortunately, almost everything -- save for the Cialis, of course -- was written in Chinese.

Thanks to China's push to become a more service-driven economy, I walked in and immediately was pounced on by two or three different employees. They started speaking quickly in Chinese and I asked them to slow down. In my only-8-day-of-lessons Mandarin, I said, "I want" and then pointed to my throat and made a coughing noise. This drummed up another minute or so of quick discussion among the workers, which ended with one woman finally saying the word for "to drink", so I assumed she was asking if I wanted cough syrup. I shook my head and said the word for eat, because that's the closest verb to "suck on" I knew. They nodded, pulled a $6 box of medicine out from a cabinet and sent me on my way.

When I got home, I sat down and Googled my purchase. Nope, not throat lozenges. Pills for tonsillitis. China pharmacy fail.

It was only when I went to the 7-Eleven for a jug of water that I noticed Ricola just sitting there next to the candy. If I didn't already love 7-Eleven for their slurpees, this would've won me over.