A few funny international things

You know, we have been travelling for a while and I was thinking the other day that I tend to talk about food a lot.  Admittedly, eating is what we are travelling for.  We like to talk about "eating our way around the world", and Nathan has already admitted that he doesn't really want to go anywhere that there isn't great food.  Though how we'll know whether there is great food without going there is another question.

 

However, I thought I would relate a couple of non food-related incidents, which interesting happened on the same day:

 

"FISH SPA AND REFLEXOLOGY" was what the sign proclaimed.  Was this a fish-friendly Hollywood-esque spa for fish, a la Paris Hilton purse-doggie?  We went to investigate, to be confronted in the window with a large tank of small fish with some human feet dangling in the tank.  The fish seemed to be nibbling at the feet and legs of this guy, who was reading a magazine. We took a picture, since who knows when this person would jump out of the tank screaming?  However, it turns out that there is a clinic here where you can dunk your feet into a tank with small, medium or large fish (the large ones are barracude size, with teeth! - just kidding, they're about the size of small coi, no teeth) and the fish eat the dead skin off of your feet and legs.  "So, you're paying them to feed their fish," said Nathan.  Yes, you would pay them the equivalent of 15$ CAD to feed their fish with your flesh for half an hour.  We weren't convinced of the advantages, so we passed on this "spa" option. 

 

SUNSCREEN SURPRISE

I feel that I am a pretty knowledgeable person when it comes to sunscreen.  I have done a bit of research, since I wear it pretty much every day.  I don't like the chemical sunblocks, like oxybenzone and and PABA, since they soak into your cells and who knows what they do in there besides block UV? So I am constantly on the lookout for physical block sunscreens with Titanium Dioxide and Zinc Oxide in them.  They are not so easy to find in this part of the world.  The natives of this area, including Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia, don't have much need for sunscreen.  They aren't roasting in their clothes like the tourists, so they can really cover up, including hats with scarfy-bits, which ensures that not much skin is exposed.  They tan pretty well anyway, but they don't WANT to be browner.  They have lots of products here that purport to LIGHTEN skin, one in particular that gives you a colour swatch so that you can compare the colour of your skin before and after using the product for a couple of weeks. 

 

We constantly are ducking into shops that might have sunscreen, and I am constantly reading labels.  There was one shop in this nice air-conditioned mall called "Skin Food" and I thought that I would check there. Their schtick is that they include different fruits and vegetables in their skin products, which are proudly advertised on each lable.  There is Tomato skin cream, and Papaya under-eye conditioner and Citrus this and Lettuce that.  They did in fact have several sunscreens there, SPF 46 and SPF 23 and I turned over bottle to read the ingredients, as is my way. 

 

The writing was in Korean.  You can alway tell Korean, since it looks like stick figures with too many arms and legs, as opposed to Chinese, which looks like little houses.  I said to the girl who was standing oh-so-attentively by my side, "This is in Korean, do you have the list of ingredients in English?".  She said no, they only had them in Korean because it was a Korean company.  So I said, "What is the active ingredient for the sunscreen?"

"Brocolli", she said.

 

Now, as I said, I've done a lot of research on skin protection, and I think that I would have heard if brocolli was an effective UV blocker. I passed on this skin care option.

 

We are still in Georgetown, Penang, where we have found a nice hotel which changes the sheets and gives us new towels every 2 days without our having to ask.  Ah, the things that become important when you're travelling. 

 

In the end, this blog was still obliquely about food, though not about eating it..  I just can't help myself!

 

ACDB