September 7, 2018
I1-4: Shijiazhuang to Beijing 石家庄 → 北京
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In the morning, when I wake up, my leg is still bothering me. It's not quite at the 'biting back tears' level of pain but it's definitely close. When I'm having a bad leg day, hard beds are just about the worst thing I can do to myself. Ultimately, I probably should have gone to a hotel or insisted on sleeping on the couch instead of in the specifically vacated just for me kid's bedroom but then I'd feel weirdly ungrateful for my awesome friends being awesome and that's the sort of discomfort that I remember for years whereas this is just normal 'I walked too much and now I'd really rather not move' agony.
I didn't foresee myself being especially active during this non-biking interlude and although I've got my ordinary medkit bag in my luggage, my stash of the extra good stuff is in my handlebar bag. My handlebar bag, of course, is on my handlebars - in Gaoyi.
Oops.
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The backpack Joy gave me to supplement my overfilled and difficult to carry pannier makes moving around much easier. I shuffle slowly to the gate of their compound. Even in the daytime, the paths are crowded with parked cars. This is partly because of the anti-pollution measures which limit cars to even and odd days and partly because many of the same people who have bought cars for the image of convenience and comfort they've learned about from movies and television have, only once they owned a car, discovered that high density cities are actually a terrible place to drive.
Breakfast, brunch, whatever you want to call it at the Muslim noodle shop just outside the gate along with a bottle of Coke helps a little with the pain in my leg. On top of everything else, I've got some synaesthesia symptoms wherein my brain happily reports all moderate discomfort to me as "your leg hurts".
Being hungry makes my leg hurt.
Period cramps make my leg hurt.
Spending too much time typing makes my fucking leg hurt.
While eating my noodles, I spend a bit of time poking around on my phone to try to find out if there's any way to get a slow train to Beijing. When I lived in Shijiazhuang, the north station—now the only remaining slow speed station—was less than half the size of the main train station. The new high speed train station is at least five or ten times the size of the old central station and as I don't actually need to be in Beijing for quite a few hours, and don't want to deal with walking through the new big station, I would totally be happy with buying a cheap ticket on the slow train, . Unfortunately, slow rail is increasingly only for freight rail and there are no tickets available out of the north station until after I already want to be in Beijing.
Between going from the drop off point to the ticket window, the ticket window to security, security to the waiting hall, the waiting hall to the platform and then to where my train car would stop, I easily do at least two kilometers of walking just inside the train station. Then, once I'm in Beijing, it's a similar amount of walking to get to the taxi rank.
I take a taxi to the Bookworm—cause it's someplace I know—to sit and eat and work until synagogue. I try to find out if they know where I can get any of the Chinese language copies of Dikötter's books (I know Mao's Great Famine was translated) but the staff is surprisingly unknowledgeable for a niche bookstore.
Myf, who I'd totally thought was heading back to New York around the time I started biking, is arriving back to Beijing from Shanghai late tonight so, after synagogue services, I meet him and a German friend of mine, Sabina, for "tacos" and beer at a place called 京A.
Today's ride: 4 km (2 miles)
Total: 577 km (358 miles)
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