D5/W1: Anguo City 安国市

August 30, 2018 to August 31, 2018

Cleaning up the city in preparation for the Herbal Medicine Fair

Most of the roads are also getting a fresh coat of tarmac and new paint lines too

I assume, back in 2012, the bike shop in Baoding [保定] must have been the people who told me about the bike shop in Anguo [安国]. I can't think of any other particular way that Li Wei would have known about me to meet me for dinner the night I arrived six years ago and to set me up in a nice enough (by which I mean not actually especially nice) guesthouse owned by a classmate of her's.

Last night, and tonight, I stayed in the same guesthouse. Li Wei and her husband were going to take me someplace much nicer to stay but the nicer places didn't want me. I actually made it behind the counter at the first of the four (the only one other than the one I stayed at where I so much as bothered with entering the lobby) and the software (which I knew wasn't exactly what you'd call "standardized" on the basis of my having to relearn it at least once per province), for only the second time ever, actually did not have the option for "Foreign Hotel Guest Registration". The other time was in 2016 with Leslie and possibly may have also been in Hebei. On that occasion, despite not having an option for foreigners, it had let me put in an English name and a passport number.

(There was also one time near Hangzhou when the option was there but grayed out via a police station set software lock and a local policy that required all foreigners to come in to the station and register in person at the station.)

In any case, since part of the point of the software is to simplify things (for everyone), it was really weird to come across a copy that was missing critical parts.

As I like to remind people when I talk about the sort of places where I've not just registered but registered on the computer, I've even stayed at a place where they charged 2元 for a bed and they thought I was a little bit weird for wanting to pay for all four beds in the room.

It didn't change very much between 2012 and 2018. There were even still chamber pots available in the bathroom even though this time it was not so cold that you wouldn't want to leave your room

I probably wouldn't mind the whole "No Foreigners Allowed" thing if there was actually something in writing somewhere that specifically said where I could stay and where I could not stay. But there isn't. Because the national government has apparently decided that's it totally chill with me staying where ever I want (with some restrictions like not wandering into military controlled areas and registering with the local police every night) and everyone else who has decided otherwise seems to have just unilaterally decided with no apparent basis in either law nor logic.

I got into Anguo tireder than I ought to be for what was supposed to be a short day and a little grumpy (but not too grumpy). Learned from my mistake of the first afternoon and sensibly ordered a small bowl of noodles (which I then barely managed to finish). The first massage place I saw was a bit more expensive than I thought was right and they wanted me to wait around for thirty minutes while a massage person showed up. I decided, instead, to go looking for the Temple of the Medicine King [药王庙] and, maybe, should the stars align, Li Wei's bicycle shop.

Does anyone else think the female Food Safety Officer looks like she's been photoshopped so much that she's a cross between a chipmunk and a Disney princess?

I thought it had been a Giant. It was actually a Dahon. Now that I think about it, maybe she owned both the Giant and the Dahon. In any case, I was riding slowly down the Street of Bicycle (and Bicycle Shaped Objects) Shops and she saw me go by and recognized me and came bounding out the door.

Six years ago she was a pudgy (by Chinese standards) young woman who was approaching the must be married (by Chinese standards) expiration date and who was completely screwing with her ability to do that whole "getting married thing" by being both college educated and a small business owner. Chinese men can be incredibly thin skinned about things like women being better educated, having higher earning potential or being taller than them.

Now she's a roly-poly (by American standards) mom of one of the largest four year olds I've ever seen. Like, seriously, before talking to the kid much, I thought he was at least six years old and couldn't reconcile the math with her somewhat obvious unmarried-and-looking state from six years ago. Her husband is a smoking hot bike mechanic who occasionally gets paid to go off and wrench for professional teams that are competing at big events like the Tour of China or the Tour of Hainan.

(After three bike shops worth of attempts to purchase a second water bottle, I now have a free Tour of China water bottle, and a spare set of quick release pedals.)

Like many of the all-too-few Chinese couples I know that seem to actually like their spouse, the two of them seem happy. Having completely saturated the fairly small market in Anguo, the bike shop isn't selling things quite as high-end as it was 6 years ago but it's selling more of them. Business is currently busy enough that neither of them need to take up part time jobs that aren't, in some way, related to cycling. They've gone from being a group of people who like to bike sometimes to a club that organizes races with government support.

And Anguo City has changed. It's cleaner. Brighter. Taller buildings. No horse carts. The Temple of the Medicine King has a new plaza and more buildings. There's an international traditional Chinese herbal medicine exhibition center. Everyone still speaks Mandarin like they have a mouth full of marbles so most of the conversation I had this morning regarding borrowing the washing machine to do laundry involved me trying, really hard, not to fall into the trap of repeating myself while speaking slower and more loudly.
Cause the guesthouse owner understood me perfectly well.
I just didn't understand her.

I spent the whole day alternating between actually working, adding pictures to earlier days of this journal, and enjoying a bit of rest. I also had nice long phone calls with both my parents and my Mike.

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	2
Comment on this entry	Comment	0