Compound Suspicions

I'll write based on the pictures above.

The first one, dubbed "Sanitation" is a view 5 minutes walk away from my house. It's actually the street immediately outside my neighborhood. There are two points of interest. The first is the local funky Chinaman, proudly displaying his stomach. The local men like to show their bellies on a hot day. Sometimes they opt to take off their shirts, but either opening a button-up shirt or rolling up a T-shirt is the norm. It's a common enough occurrence. And it makes the people look like yokels. But hey, they act like it too.

The reason I took the picture, however, is the well. It's the local way of drawing daily water from a well in middle of the street. I do not know if it's straight up sewage, or is it the same water as the river sitting just behind the camera. The water in the river might actually be worse than sewage, but if you are the type to have a well on the sidewalk, you probably don't care.

I really don't trust these people when it comes to pretty much anything. And I have a baby on it's way.

At least the baby shops are for the wealthy, and as such are nice and clean. The items are mostly sensical and useful. Or I imagine they are. I'm still at the stage where I'm googling "goat milk as breast milk supplement" and seeing what comes up. They sell a lot of enriched goat milk here as supplement, by the way. According to my brief research, it's mostly a viable course of action too.

And then the shops strike out. They sell Eel-Calcium pills. I'm not going to apologize for the instant when my trust for the clean, nice, well-meaning baby flies out of the window the second I see a smiling Eel on a pill box. My thoughts immediately return to the street wells and rolled up T-shirts. Buying a product in China is a veritable minefield of broken, sub-par, coped, imitated and outright dangerous goods. But yes, if I manage to raise a healthy kid staring in Taizhou, China, I can do anything. Catching flies with chopsticks should be trivial in comparison.

My suspicions aside, my girlfriend and the now approximately 5 month baby are both healthy. No thanks to Eel-pills.
OP out.