Getting weed in Shanghai

February 5, 2009: I met Ima as i hurried past his flatbread shop on a beer-buying errand, stopping in my tracks as he called after me, "Hashish marrrwana." (the rrr is supposed to indicate a rolled r).

Well actually, yes please.

I'd been waiting almost 2 years for this, though never expecting it to happen. He took me into an upstairs room decked out like an Arabian desert tent with middle-eastern carpets and pictures of Xinjiang, his homeland, covering the walls. There we puffed on a couple of fat joints and drank bowls of Xinjiang tea for an hour or so before i left to continue on my errand. Once i reached the street however, i was seized by the thought of getting locked up if the police noticed, and i made straight for home, which thankfully was just around the corner.

I needn't have worried of course, given Ima's willingness to shout out "Hashish marrwana" on the street outside his shop whenever a foreigner walks past. As he pointed out the next time i saw him, the police in China barely even know the existence of "Big hemp", much less know it by the names the rest of the world knows it by. Almost nobody in China would even know the smell. The smell, that is, of the buds being burned. As some of you may recall, we discovered last year, a non-potent version of it grows freely in Gansu, both in fields entirely dedicated to it and also in ditches and wasteland alongside major roads, where it is considered a kind of easy-to-grow sesame seed. (Actually hemp and sesame are both represented by the same Chinese character.)

His weed isn't cheap by Chinese commodity prices - it's about the same price as in Australia or the UK - but it's strong enough. Ima claims "everyone" (that is, everyone except all the women) smokes it in his hometown. Judging by Ima, those stuck down here in China Proper wouldn't tolerate simply being without this essential element of their culture... I imagine from now on, the second-last month of our time in China, it will always be quite easy to obtain weed, as the supply lines are undoubtedly direct from Xinjiang, and people are coming and going from Xinjiang in large numbers every day by train. It would be very easy for him to simply get whatever friend-of-a-friend who was coming down to Shanghai next to pack a pack of the green stuff, and i'm sure many, many Uighurs - or other indigenous ethnic groups who i'll call collectively Xinjiangis - have such supply lines open.

That next time i saw him happened to be my 25th birthday - today (well, it should've been today so i'm backdating it). Until then it had been quite possibly the shittest birthday ever, spent reformatting my computer and re-installing windows. Then there was Ima's weed cafe for lunch. Not only did he supply weed, we ordered Xinjiang food for munchies, the main part of which turned out to be one of the best ideas i've ever seen in cooking. It was pieces of mutton and vegetables (not particularly special but delicious nonetheless) in a deep plate of soupy sauce - and here's the crucial bit - with a flatbreat submerged in the sauce...So fuckin good - the question i have now is: Why don't more people put flatbread at the bottom of juicy, sloppy dishes? In addition to all of this, he whacked on some music video VCDs that alternated song-by-song between fascinating lute-based Xinjiangi songs of love and loss filmed among the spectacular scenes of that land, and random 70s and 80s funk/soul - not your average Marvin Gaye or anything, but real random stuff that no-one's heard for more than 20 years. He told me these songs were popular on Xinjiang radio way back when he was a kid. Globalisation ain't no new thang eh.