Every month I feature a “Random Discovery Photo of the Month” on our website, a photo that is “random” in both the traditional sense of the word (chosen with no very specific criteria in mind and in no conscious order) and the contemporary colloquial sense of “strange and surprising.” Most of the photos on our site highlight China’s many beautiful and culturally profound places, but I wanted to have a prominent place to regularly feature photos to reflect the delightfully humorous, quaint, or just plain weird things that foreign travelers inevitably experience in China. Many of these photos were taken by me during one of my many travel experiences in China, though sometimes I choose an interesting photo that I’ve come across on Flickr or another Internet source.

March 2010: This is not, of course, actual panda milk, but cow’s milk produced by a company with the name Panda Brand, but at first glance it’s pretty disturbing. Given that even within China the Cantonese people are known for daring to eat anything (“广东人没有不敢吃的”), one wonders whether this would be a Cantonese delicacy if pandas were not an endangered species. (photo by Ming Xia)

April 2010: “Adibas” shoes—In China I’ve seen every kind of attempt to narrowly avoid copyright infringement you can imagine (including a t-shirt with a familiar-looking cartoon dog called “Snooby”), but for some reason this one in particular cracks me up. In a similar vein, here are some amusing variations on the McDonald’s logo that I recently came across online. (photo by “Lanchongzi”)

May 2010: This leprechaun was apparently a participant in Beijing’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. He seems to be pulling off the unlikely role with self-applauding conviction, despite the conspicuous clash between his red beard and black hair. (photo by Ivan Walsh)

June 2010: I came across these “U.S. Army” pillows in a resort store in an isolated mountain area of Guangdong Province in 2009. (Interestingly, in recent years I have continued to see people in China dressed in clothing featuring the American flag or a reference to the U.S. military.) In that same mountain area, an area with almost no Western tourist presence, I came across cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon being sold in a roadside convenience store. Globalization is happening in some very surprising ways.

July 2010: In my many trips to China, I still haven’t tried scorpion, but these “scorpion kabobs” (for sale in Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping district) do look surprisingly tasty. You might need a toothpick, though. (photo by Thierry)

August 2010: On the same trip to Guangdong Province, I saw these birds (ducks, I think, but I’m not sure) being herded along the road like goats or sheep. Unfortunately, I could only snap this blurry photo through the windows of our bus as we navigated the traffic jam. Driving conditions were quite fowl that day, you might say.

September 2010: One of my favorite places in China is Lijiang, a remote valley nestled amidst spectacular mountains in Yunnan Province. One of its many charms is the laid-back character of its “old town” areas, where you can see sights like barmaids engaging in a spirited singing contest with competitors across the lane or dogs hanging out on roofs. (photo by Chris Feser)

October 2010: Last fall, on my umpteenth trip to Shanghai’s Bund (it never gets old), I came across one of the strangest sights I’ve ever seen: this cat decadently ensconced in a chariot being pulled down the street by a hapless team of toy dogs. The chariot seems to be some kind of patriotic nod to the Shanghai Expo, which was still going on at the time but certainly didn’t need a gimmick like this to get media attention. Someone in the crowd of pedestrians surrounding the chariot, noticing my baffled reaction, said something I didn’t quite catch about how the chariot had achieved some level of Internet fame in China. I haven’t been able to confirm that claim, but I certainly would not be surprised if it were true. (On a side note, how is it that Star Wars computer wallpaper, among other completely random images, comes up in a Google image search for “Shanghai Expo cat chariot”? Looks like that algorithm needs a little tweaking, Google.)

November 2010: “Pennington Bear”—While visiting a newly developed pedestrian mall area in Xi’an last fall, I noticed a group of human billboards (can’t say what they were promoting, however) in various animal costumes and clown getups. You would think that the bear or cat costume this guy was wearing would be enough to get people’s attention, but no…for no reason that I can puzzle out, he threw in a Chad Pennington jersey for good measure. Chad Pennington, of all people—a player in an American sport that I’m quite sure had nothing to do with whatever they were promoting, a sport that as far as I know isn’t even marginally popular in China. For that matter, how did they even get their hands on a Chad Pennington jersey in Xi’an? Truly random.

December 2010: This ice sculpture of a tiger head appears to be eating a minivan. This photo was taken in Northeastern China near Harbin, whose outdoor winter display of giant ice sculptures is internationally famous. (photo by Ivan Walsh)

January 2011: This is another photo from Dayan, one of the “old town” sections of Lijiang, that exemplifies its relaxed and informal vibe. These boys, probably children of the local residents and shopkeepers, were playing some game of chance (and judging from their demeanor, actually gambling), but I didn’t want to interrupt to ask what exactly it was they were playing.

February 2011: I took this photo in the Shanghai Museum in 2005. The museum displays were fascinating, of course, but I couldn’t help being distracted by this completely inexplicable little cartoon figure featured underneath the museum pieces: it had alien or animal eyes, painfully splayed fingers, and unnaturally curved extremities, and it was naked except for some kind of cap, bikini underwear, and unidentifiable footwear, with two conspicuous little dots for nipples. It was a complete mystery to me how such a thing came to be used in the museum. Who approved this idea? Was it done by some mid-level museum manager as a kind of in-joke? Was the museum’s collection on loan from a friendly (if a little strange) alien race who had preserved our past for us? It was one of those amusing, perplexing details that reminded me as a Westerner how strikingly different the Chinese sense of taste and propriety can be—in the West you might see figures like this in a children’s museum, but not on displays featuring world-class works of art and artifacts thousands of years old! With my Western biases, I can only shake my head and say, “Weird.”

March 2011: Amusing examples of Engrish or Chinglish [post temporarily unavailable] still abound in China. The most interesting ones occur when bad translations mix with cultural differences that defy easy explanation. I believe I came across this mysterious device in a shop in Shanghai. Even taking into account the clumsy translation, I’m not sure what a “fruit vegetable counteracts poison Machine” is, what it does, or why only the word “machine” is capitalized on the package. Can people use it to eat rotten or toxic fruits and vegetables? Do Chinese spies carry it around to detoxify themselves, using only whatever fruits and vegetables are handy, when enemy agents have slipped arsenic into their food? Whatever it is, it must have something to do with Traditional Chinese Medicine. A Google search for its Chinese name, “果蔬解毒机,” does generate over one million results (as of today), if you want to learn more about it. Personally, I’d rather let it remain an interesting mystery.

April 2011: This is a tiny kitten I came across in a Shanghai alley, perched high on a narrow ledge and apparently enjoying its own little patch of grass, while I was taking photos of a traditional “shikumen” district in the downtown area. (See my post entitled “Shanghai’s Disappearing Shikumen” [temporarily unavailable] for more photos and an explanation of what “shikumen” are.) When I noticed it up there, it seemed like such a precarious place for something so fragile and innocent, particularly in the midst of an urban environment fraught with dangers for such small trusting creatures. No doubt my all-too-human tenderness was misguided, however, as I’m sure that millions of callow Shanghai kittens quickly learn to prosper in that perilous city. Anyway, I wrote a haiku (originally a Chinese form of poetry, I believe) to go with the photo:

Kitten on the edge
Small patch of urban ledge-grass
Precarious life

A strange window display finds immortality on the Internet.	How could anyone be “overstocked” on something so awesome?

May 2011: This month’s photo is one of innumerable jaw-droppingly (or at least double-takingly) random sights I’ve come across while exploring the vast human particle accelerator known as Shanghai. As you can imagine, in a city with that many options for shoppers, to be successful you have to find a way to stand out. This shop certainly got my attention with its mannequins, which are not only cutely cartoonish or disturbingly psychotic, depending on your point of view, but also used in an inventive way: ostensibly, the sole purpose of mannequins is to be an inconspicuous display device for items of clothing, but clearly the primary function of these particular mannequins is akin to that of the wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube men used at American car dealerships. Otherwise, why would some of them be naked? Well, here’s some free advertising and attention for you, whoever you are—too bad I can’t remember exactly where I took this, or what exactly you’re selling, or what the name of your store is. (It does appear to be across the street from “Jun,” though.)

Our Random Discovery Photos of the Month will resume next week with a new photo for September. Stay tuned!