Smoking Clown Flower Delivery Service

The Sign

I thought I'd take the time to highlight some of Beijing's more unorthodox sights.  I'll start with one of my favorites.  Shortly after moving to Gulou I had my first encounter with this company.  I was nearly run over by a smoking clown on a three-wheeled motor bike.  Some first impression, am I right?  Little did I know that this would become a common occurrence during my time in Beijing.  My initial reaction was that IT had finally decided to come for me.  The realization of a terrible childhood fear that always made me wish I had asthma, so I could carry an inhaler.  Once I realized it wasn't in fact Tim Curry in a clown outfit, but a chain-smoking Chinese man, I got curious.  What?  Why?  Like so many of the weird things in China, no one seems to have a halfway decent answer to this question.  

Employees on a break

 For any honrary Beijinger, getting flowers delivered by a clown riding a giant duck isn't such an unusual gift.  Throw in the fact that the clown is almost always smoking and often looks clinically depressed, and you have a Beijing institution.  After almost getting run over that day, I started to see the ubiquitous duck everywhere, cruising the hutongs of central Beijing.  The duck also played on another of my childhood fears, resembling the Penguin's preferred mode of transportation in Batman Returns.  Between psychotic clowns from the Macro-verse and Batman super villains, this company packs enough punch to traumatize even the most well adjusted six year old.       

Getting ready to wreak havoc
on Gotham City

 I really want to hear the sales pitch the founder of this company to investors.  So, we will deliver the flowers in a giant motorized duck, and we will dress our employees as a clowns.  To some people it might sound like the kind of outside-the-box thinking that made Apple a global powerhouse.  However, I remain skeptical.  It has been successful enough to open another location.  That's right.  There are at least two locations of Smoking Clown Flower Delivery Service that this humble blogger knows about in the Beijing area, proving the power of Apple's slogan, Think Different.  And proving maybe no one, especially me, can predict the crazy stuff Chinese consumers will spend their money on.