Today being a Monday the city was teeming at 745 in the morning. The usual soundtrack of demented car horn beeping was amplified several times, and the traffic was much heavier, making crossing the road even more of a gamble with one’s life. Red lights don’t necessarily mean stop to drivers of motor vehicles, and riders of bikes, motorbikes and mopeds completely ignore them, frequently taking over the pavements when the congestion on the bike lane makes progress too slow or they want to go in the other direction.  No self respecting two wheeled vehicle rider wears a helmet or uses lights in the dark, and when a moped rider came off his bike when the front wheel skidded on a stone, the only people who stopped to see if he was ok and give him a few plasters for his amazingly minor injuries were the foreign devils. No one else turned a hair. Presumably it happens all the time.

This was the first clinic day so we set off armed with the regulation embroidered white coats to the hospital where we met Dr Wang and a group of students from the Czech Republic. Off to the acupuncture clinic then on the 5th floor of the hospital. It is quite unlike anything in the West. Patients come in for their acupuncture from early in the morning – before 8am. They line the acupuncture corridor until their turn to see the doctor comes.There are about 14 doctor’s rooms in the corridor, totally unlike a Western consulting room. The room has 8 beds, a doctor’s desk and an Xray viewer. The patient sees the doctor first, then goes to a free bed (no niceties with fresh covers) where the doctor needles them. One of the many Chinese medical students then applies TENS clips to designated needles and the patient in some cases can adjust the machine themselves. In all a treatment takes up to an hour as often patients are treated with cupping after needling.

The morning was busy between 8 and 11, and the doctor in our allocated room spoke no English so he ignored us. One of the students had some English and helped with point identification. There is a lot of facial palsy in China if today is anything to go by.

Armed with ID badges from the admin department once the morning session finished it was time for a light lunch nearby before the next session at 2. The afternoon was better, Dr Hu spoke good English and took time to teach us.

Dinner was rather early due to the timetable constraints – in a restaurant near the Posh establishment we had visited two nights previously. Another slightly fraught negotiation with pictures and gestures and the odd word of English trying to negotiate what we wanted. Eventually a huge cooked fish materialised on a platter adorned with vegetables and seasonings, accompanied by heaving wooden tubs of rice, bowls of mixed salad, a plate of unidentifiable chewy stuff cut into diamond shapes, and a dish of spicy dried tofu which was very hot indeed. The fish was judged to be very tasty, and the vegetables were extremely well cooked.

The day was rounded off with the first in a series of talks on Tui Na, the ancient Chinese treatment with physical therapy and manipulations. The class was given by Dr Jian Wang (not the same Dr Wang as before) via an interpreter, though it turned out Dr Wang actually had quite a lot of English. The practical session produced the class dunce as I couldn’t get the hang of the basic movement despite repeated pleas to “relax the wrist – wrist too stiff!” I suspect they wondered why on earth four foreigners would think they could learn Tui Na in a week when the real thing takes three years to study. Still a little taste is interesting.

The end of a long and experience filled day. I will probably be smelling moxa in my sleep tonight.