There is no Coka Cola in Chinatown. There are no potato chips or junk food of any sort. McDonalds is known only by its absence. Though Chicago’s Chinatown exists close to the heart of the city-proper, there is a distinct, Asian feeling to the area when you walk through its intimate confines and find lunch in small restaurants that resemble Communist-throwback cafeterias rather than “fine” dining establishments. I prefer the Communist-throwback cafeterias, because very old men reading Mandarin and Cantonese newspapers know where to eat the best food while giving their wives a chance to play Mah Jong with the girls and gossip without those bothersome men around, messing everything up. There are no convenience stores in Chinatown. You buy what you need at local markets, all dedicated to a particular range of products. Herbalists stand beside pan-Asian hair salons. River Sky Travel shares building space with Tasty Place, a bakery/café that might have free WiFi. It exists downstairs from an inscrutable business with a name rendered only in Chinese, with the declaration: “You have questions. We have answers.” As far as I can tell it’s some kind of computer-related business. There is neon in Chinatown. There are fu dog and fu lions, guarding against evil with their elegant, curved fangs. Red, the color of prosperity, is abundant, as are dragons with a lucky number of splayed claws and friendly, gaping jaws. Candy wrapped in edible rice paper is what the children eat—and quite a few of the adults, too, and as you glance north, Chicago’s Sears Tower (I’ll never call it by its new name) stands like a forlorn and sullen accident on the pagoda-clotted horizon. Wafts of incense filter into the air from various shops, and near the northern border of the neighborhood (where exuberant dangerously-cute street-rats build nests in an odd, fenced-in enclosure) a pan-Asian supermarket sells a variety of foods that can be found only in Asia-dominant places. It’s a supermarket devoid of anything recognizable in the Western world. It looks strangely Czech for that, though at least in Czech supermarkets, you can find names written in English. In Prague, if you want good fruit juice, just look for “Clever”—the ubiquitous brand name there. In Chicago’s Chinatown, if you want good fruit juice, good luck in deciphering the Simplified Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, or Korean labels. Orange juice doesn’t even have a picture of an orange on the label, though you might see children with flowers in their hair. In our search for liquid refreshment, we settled on English tea with milk in oddly-shaped plastic bottles. We weren’t in the mood for that strangely gelatinous green stuff clearly intended for kids…nor were we willing to buy a gallon of some pomegranate-colored liquid with sediment on the bottom. And so, with English Tea with milk (and microwave heating instructions rendered in Hiragana, Katakana, and mercifully little Kanji) we ambled through the Chinatown Mall. I missed a bit of it because of my tea. I’d studied Japanese for two years and found myself really confused by the sheer mass of information printed on my “English Tea” bottle. All I know is that according to the label, the tea is “very delicious” when heated properly; and drinking it cold is refreshing for modern people…or something like that. I have to say, it was delicious and strangely floral in taste…which is why this elevator-shaft pagoda is the first picture I remembered to take, despite passing all sorts of interesting things, almost garish things. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and thank you to those who have marked previous bits of my work as Favorites. It means a lot!