Taming the green beast - and the baijiu beast

In the funny way the world works, I was drinking absinthe every night during a recent trip to Switzerland, and was immediately invited to sip it again when I return to Beijing.

The greenish liquor was illegal in my youth - popularly associated with all sorts of evils from madness to incest.

"It won't make you hallucinate and it won't make you chase farm animals," the bartender at Geneva's Swissotel Metropole told us with a chuckle, as he poured "the green fairy" into a crystal glass.