My eyes! They're burning!

One of the wonderful things I've found here in China is a set of eye drops. They are made by the Rohto (Mentholatum) company in Japan and the particular version I've got seems to be unavailable outside of Asia. (Other Rohto/Mentholatum eye drops are available in the USA, but none, for some reason, are available in Canada. This is too bad.)

I encountered these eye drops first about two years ago. My eyes got something caught in them that was very painful while I was walking down the street with Joan one day. We happened to be near a pharmacy, so we went inside and asked for eye drops. Joan looked over the available set and latched onto these ones. Right there in the shop we opened the package, undid the top and Joan dropped them in my eyes. As the bottle was moving to the first eye, I was thinking to myself, "hang on, this smells familiar – what is it?" Just as the drops hit my eye it struck me what that familiar scent was.

It was menthol. (Had I known that it was a product of the Mentholatum division of Rohto, of course, this wouldn't have been a surprise. Here, however, there is no such division. It was just the Rohto brand.)

Ten seconds of intense burning later something miraculous happened. The burning vanished. So did the pain of whatever it was that got in my eye and made it feel like a (very small) knife was stuck in it. So did all visible blood vessels when I checked the eye in a mirror the shop had. Indeed the eye that didn't get the drops looked positively unhealthy by comparison. Too, the eye in question not only felt better, it felt... cool, like someone had built a tiny air conditioner in it.

I quickly put the drops in the other eye and endured the ten seconds of burning and had the same magic feeling (and lack of redness) occur there as well. I've been using these drops ever since.