needles in my neck

My friends wife is a Chinese doctor and I went for my first check up.
I haven't been to a doctor other than for stitches in years.
She felt my pulse through my wrist and told me my kidneys are terrible and therefore my liver is bad. Kidneys are like the water and liver is the tree. If there isn't good water they tree won't grow strong. My heart is also weak because my circulation is very poor. And my blood is no good. She proceeded to write a prescription. Then we continued to acupressure and acupuncture. I had a bad neck from snowboarding on Monday so she worked on it. Acupressure hurts. Acupuncture (in the picture) doesn't. It's strange how you can feel the needle break the skin but there is never any pain.

That afternoon I went to the Chinese Medicine Pharmacy. It was a really interesting place. They didn't let me take pictures there.. a real shame. The wall was lined with brown drawers. The pharmacists in long white coats all carried a scale in their hand. They would get the prescriptions and move around to the drawers weighing out the strange contents of the drawers. They would put them on their workbench in big piles and then fill them into bags. I walked away with what seemed like a grocery bag full of stuff i could have picked up off the ground after a walk through the forest back home in Canada.
I met an interesting man there while waiting for the prescription to be filled. He's 70 years old and was very different from any old man I've talked to in China before. My Chinese is not that good. I struggle in conversation. But i talked to this man for well over half an hour. He's definitely from another generation. He told me some great bits of wisdom.


*remember: the words of an old man, not me*
-It would be best if the whole world could communicate. We wouldn't fight so much.
-Chinese people used to be trustworthy. Not anymore. Money Corrupts.
-make a tea from these rhino horn shavings and your cold will be forgotten


All in all an interesting day