Dispensary

We were able to tour a Chinese herbal dispensary at the end of our last day.  It was amazing and I think that we could use some of the ideas to improve our own Bastyr Chinese Herbal Dispensary (attention Allen). 

Hopefully this numbering system that I'm using will show up on the blog.  If not...I'm sorry.  I can only hope that each picture and it's explanation will be decipherable.  

(Picture 22)  Note the nice wooden table and chairs.  I think it's time we got rid of that plastic table and moved in one of those!  Also, the boring white lab coats could be replaced with those snazzy blue uniforms.  Hmm?

(Picture 25)  Clearly our jar system is not challenging enough.  The drawers could effectively remove most visual cues.

(Pictures 26 and 27)  This formula is monumental.  Suddenly I am ashamed.

(Pictures 30 and 31)  Okay, so I think this may give us some clues on how to fold up the formulas using the non-paper bag method.  But I still have no real idea of how they are able to do this.  It is pretty amazing.

The dispensary was really incredible thing to get to see.  It was beautiful on the inside and amazing to watch how they measured and built all of the formulas.  Often they used no scales at all, but would just eyeball how much to put in each formula.  Sometimes they would pull out the tiny gold scale and measure the herbs that way.  We even got to see some rare herbs like cinnabar.  It was great.

Ann