Can Something Be Exotic without being a little Bizzare?

For me the short answer is no. Finding a little something of the quirky, unexpected, sometimes darker nature of the human soul is what the meaning of adventure entails. Greeting me for my first time in this country I had heard so little about was sights like the one above: Getting your ya-yas , as they used to say in the eighties, with things like tribal lady models on coffee ads (instead of sex symbols) and beer with one-celled blue green algae as an additive.

I don't know what you, dear reader, know about spirulina (sorry, no link), but for me it has always been associated with the excesses of vegetarianism. A former vegetarian myself, and certainly not against any but the more extreme forms like 'breatharianism' and stuff *, I was quite enthused when I discovered that it was loaded with protein (something like three to four times more than beef, depending on the cut)

But when I looked at it, it was singularly unappealing. It was, in short, a blue-green powder, the color that only a dedicated Dadaist would color food to make people freak out. Furthermore, it smelled like algae (because it is) and tasted like algae (I grew up on a lake, which filled our mouths, noses and ears with algae).

So, naturally, you can't just hold your nose and swallow the two spoonfuls of blue powder per day just because it contains more protein than a twelve ounce steak.....smart vegetarians blend it in with yoghurt, bananas, sugar, ice cream, anything that blenders well. So naturally I was surprised and pleased and....oh yeah, I almost forgot the passive verb form of 'exotic', but English doesn't have that one, when I saw that these clever Burmese were taking their protein orally - with a kick. Of course you'd probably need to drink a half a case of these things to get the necessary quantity of Spirulina, so....

Imagine, then, my disappointment when I 'Googled' the word combination just now and discovered that Qingdao is also marketing this kind of beer---and probably Budweiser will be next. ("Would you like a Budalina?") Oh well, so much for the exotic factor. Anyways, it seems hard to imagine a country in the world with such a sight as these two billboards present the seer with.

I was tickled pink as our strange taxi (didn't have any taxi markings, but the man had some kind of laminated permission to drive people around for money on the dash, and we had to walk way away from the airport to get into this contraption - My guess is that he didn't want to pay kickbacks to the airport officials), as our strange taxi tooled around the choking dirty streets of this newfound exotic place I had wanted to come to for seventeen years.

that's all for now, folks...please stay tuned, I've got over 700 mb of jpegs on Burma...including a short propoganda film filmed in nuttyvision!

*speaking of extremism, I was shocked to discover that spirulina actually represents part of the evolution of plants to mammals - strictly speaking it is not a plant, because it lacks stiff cellulose cell walls, though it has a poorly organized nucleus (I'm paraphrasing here, forgive me cellular biologists) - but, and especially if you were an extremist, you could make the case that this living thing is not plant life and should thus not be eaten by serious vegetarians. What would you call these kind of people? Why, cellulitists of course. Don't blame me that the spelling is so close to cellulitis.