Beijing is OBSESSED with Hello Kitty. Not since Tokyo, where Hello Kitty borders on out of control fetishism (great - not you'll be able to find this post by Googling "hello kitty fetish", soooo, I might as well add the word "Satan" here just to put the cherry on top of the sundae) have I seen a city where not only Sanrio's ubiquitous Hello Kitty reigns supreme, but anything at all to do with kittens.
Just mumble the words "new kitten," and you'll have women all over you as if you were Kobe beef and they were sumo wrestlers. Of course, all of the women who run to you will be decked in in all of their Hello Kitty gear, which then takes a certain amount of restraint to not run in front of a bus. And there's this great innocence in, you know, 31-year-old women just losing their MINDS over a fictitious drawing of a kitten or the real thing.
I wonder if Beijing men do the math: "I can get women to date me by buying nice clothes, a decent suit, getting a good haircut, maybe buying dinner when we go out...OR...I can just get a kitten out of the dumpster."
So, if the whole Hello Kitty aspect of Beijing isn't sufficiently cloying for you, let me tell you about this city's (and, let's be honest, almost ALL of Asia's) obsession with SWEET drinks.
I've had sweet drinks. No one can say that Sprite isn't sweet. Or juice drinks. Or, I don't know, a melted freeze pop. But here, you can find drinks that completely rocket "sweet" into an otherworldly concept.
Take the innocent iced tea. Sure, you can get it with sugar in North America. And in the southern US, the sweet tea is sweeter than normal. But if those are 3 or 4 on the 1 to 10 scale of sweet, the iced tea here can be a 37. I had a sip, yesterday, of an innocent looking iced tea. It was a normal colour, no loose sugar floating around. Normal. Then I took a sip and had to really force to swallow it as the gag reflex was winning for a few seconds there. It was a glass of pure, I don't know, liquid sugar, I guess.
They also have these very trendy sweet shops frequented by mostly but not exclusively young people. There, you can find the highest caloric content in the world packed into the least volume of liquid. These drinks border on the flourescent, the glass vessel almost unable to contain the color of sweet. One sip of these icy, milk-shake-sized devils and you will be sugar-fueled to run a marathon. Uphill.
If the drink isn't enough for you, hop on over to one of the city's many haunts for "cute" cakes. I have counted ninety-three cakes in the shape and cuteness of a fuzzy bunny. Like Hello Kitty, they are pink and white. They just perspire cute. And happy. And cute and happy. And cute. And, yes, happy.
I have not dared taste one of these cakes, as my sip of iced tea has already filled my sucrose content for 2008, but they just make my eyes water and pancreas start to work the night shift. I sense that they taste of sunshine and ecstatic. With maybe a hint of delerious and a pinch of wow.
But the thing that drives all of this, here and places such as Hong Kong, Tokyo Seoul, is this massive sense of innocence in the whole enterprise. It's a return to simpler times, when 30-year-olds can be six again and six-year-old can be, well, five. In a culture where the average person really doesn't drink alcohol (I'm not saying that noone drinks - business drinking is huge here but it's not the norm for the average person to relax with a few drinks at home) this is an attachment that has become an important cultural recreation.
And it's just so darn cute. And pink.
ANS
