Pornographic Chicken

The street the orchid garden was on was a busy, cosmopolitan one with lots of big hotels like the Guangzhou Mariott, and lots of banks. We also happened to pass a great many African and Arab Muslims, often dressed in "odd" hats and robes, really the first non-Westernized garb I'd seen the whole trip. Lots of the restaurants advertised themselves not only in three different languages but three entirely different alphabets: Chinese characters, Arabic script and boring old English with roman letters. We passed a place advertising Lebanese food and one called 1001 Nights. Then we found what is probably the most terrifying billboard in existence:



I almost wish I could understand what the words being squawked out the chicken's butt were supposed to say, but that really cuts down on my ability to wildly speculate, so I'll make do with things being the way that they are.

After seeing this come hither chicken we headed back to the subway to return to the hostel. After we emerged from the subway we met the other chicken. She was parked outside of a little shop and had been all day, with a handy puddle of water to drink from and a flagstone to perch dejectedly on for hours on end. Her little comb was flopped to one side.





She must have been somebody's pet, because she was always there in the daylight hours when we passed by that tree, but after dark she would be gone. Not really a streetwalker chicken, not really a daywalker either.

I opted for a quiet afternoon spent melting beneath the ceiling fans, reading more Sherlock Holmes and catching up on The Internet. Brennan went out and foraged for a while, finally coming back from a pastry shop with some really interesting goodies. He had almost brought an entire cake, because some of them were lavish and glossy and very strange looking, but instead he brought just a little slice of fruit tart. He also had some green bread, which he thought would be like the melon bread he tried in Japan, but ended up just being studded with red beans and vaguely sweet. He also brought kiwi milk, which tasted sweet and dusty and a little acidic all at the same time. The pièce de résistance was his find of what looked like cute little cakes decorated like sushi. He took one bite into his sushi cake and discovered several dismaying things. 1) Though the "rice" part of the cake was made of a spongy yellow cake, the wrap was authentic nori seaweed and 2) the center of the sushi roll cake was made of some sort of fish paste. I stuck to kiwi milk and fruit tart and green bread, it seemed safest.