"We're going to the dentist tomorrow," I mentioned, to which Shirley immediately asked, "whose tooth hurts?"

That's how differently people view dentists here.

It's been more than three years since my last visit to a dentist, so my visit was filled with a bit of trepidation. We wandered up Zhengyi Road in search of the dentist that we had heard about from friends. We found what looked to be the place up where the road hits Zhengyi hill and gets all crooked. So we wandered in. All three people were busy working on teeth, so it took a few moments for someone to come to the front desk. I asked if this was the place with the English speaking dentist which our friends had told us about. They said, "yep, someone here speaks a bit of English."

It turned out that the head of the practice wasn't in today, but we decided since it seemed like the right place, that we'd get our teeth cleaned anyway. I sat down on the chair, and the dentist that was there looked at my teeth. She told me that I'd need two fillings -- one new, and one for a cavity growing next to a filling I previously had done in the U.S. (how annoying is that). She also let me know what their prices were at that point, saying that because my teeth were cleaner than average, the cleaning would "only" be 99 yuan. If I come back for a cleaning within 6 months, the next cleaning is only 60 yuan.

I think that's a great way to get people to come to the dentist more regularly. It benefits them because the cleanings they have to do are presumably more straightforward, and there's an economic incentive for the patient to come in every 6 months instead of slightly longer. I wonder how well it works.

After the cleaning was done, the dentist came back and said that she'd fill the easier cavity. She got the drill and started drilling. At some point, it started to hurt. I flinched a bit. Well, probably more than a bit. She asks me, "do you want an anesthetic?" In truth, it hadn't started hurting that much yet, so I asked her if there was still a lot of drilling left to do.

Now this is one of the coolest things I've experienced, being an ignorant foreigner unable to speak the language in several places. People understand what it's like to not understand what anyone is saying, and they come up with simple ways of expressing things. She looked at the tooth, paused, and said "maybe about 20 more seconds."

I asked, "do I need to not move?" She told me, "yes, it would be better if I didn't move." She also pointed out that all the Americans that came to them wanted anesthetic for this step. I'm not 100% sure if that's true, but a lot of my American friends that have mentioned various medical procedures do seem to love their anesthetic.

I decided that it really didn't hurt enough to bother, so I told her to go ahead and drill. It wasn't that bad. She told the hygienist about having to estimate how much drilling was left. I can't imagine she ever would give such a concrete guess to a Chinese-speaking patient.

The last cavity I had filled in the U.S., I was asked if I wanted the old-style silver amalgam filling or the new-style tooth-colored filling, and there was a significant price difference between the two. Here, I wasn't even asked. They just used tooth colored filling.

In the end, it all cost 179 yuan ($22.87). I'm going back tomorrow when the head dentist is back and they'll confer about the other cavity (the one growing under the filling I already have).