I'll be in the jungle for the next few days so you won't hear from me. Before I go though, I just wanted to leave you with something to watch. It's a short snippit from a documentary about Binlang, or Betel nut; the Asian equivalent of chewing tobacco. It looks like a big clove of garlic rapped in a leaf. It tastes like ass, but it definitely gives you a serious jolt of caffeine like energy. Binlang definitely has the same connotations here as chew does in The US. It's seen as lower class, rural, gross, and only for men. Taxi drivers use it alot because it gives them energy, but they don't have to pee all the time, like they would if they were drinking coffee.
And then there are the girls. Attractive, and extremely scantily dressed, they stand outside the binlang shops and jump around, eat lollipops, pick things up off the ground, anything to bring customers to the stores. It's really something to see. And the guys eat it up. It's like a national pastime. Every store tries to outdo the other, not in quality of its product, but in the attractiveness of its girls. The stores don't even process the stuff. All the people working in the tiny shops on the street selling milk tea and cigarettes spend their free time rolling it up. They mostly ignore foreigners, though, but only because they know we don't chew binlang. So watch the video, and enjoy your weekend.
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