感冒了/Gan mao le
I’ve got a cold, something I hate having happen over here. The picture has nothing to do with having a cold; it’s just something who’s English description caught my eye as I was shopping for some throat lozenges. As the Chinese name makes clear, It’s really fortified sugar for old people (i.e., “For the aged“). I think English lends itself to these kinds of mistakes more than Chinese does, or at least I haven’t gotten to the point where I make “cute” errors rather than just saying something completely incomprehensible. Something to aspire to.
I went to the big drug store across the street from BNU. It always amazes me what you can buy there—Prozac and Tegretol caught my eye. Tegretol is an anti-seizure medication, and not something to be used experimentally. The cold medications all had pseudoephedrine (something Dr. Alice has convinced me is counterproductive, or were Chinese things that for all I knew had the same ingredients). So I ended up just getting some aspirin and throat lozenges.