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That morning in Zhangmo, I was chatting with my colleague Jake. Jake is currently on the east coast so it was his night time. He was a little surprised to see me up and active so early. I might razz Myf about his ridiculously late mornings but I'm not exactly what you most people (who aren't Myf) would call a "morning person". As a general rule, when I'm not biking, I'm rarely out and about and doing things much before 10. But there I was—at 7ish—awake and holding a conversation.

By way of explanation I sent Jake first a photo of my room and then a photo of my room's proximity to the main road.

His response: "your idea of fun is not my idea of fun, but more power to you."

"Oh, it's not that this is fun. This is in fact quite miserable. It's just that sometimes you need the miserable stuff to make you realize just how awesome the awesome bits are."

That's what today's trip to Beijing was like. Miserable stuff. Lots and lots of miserable stuff.

Kaylee and I picked the North Yangquan Railway Station for my ticket to Beijing because there's an expressway that runs all the way from Zuoquan to there and both of us just sort of assumed that, of course, one of the buses from a county seat to the next closest city would take the expressway. Also that there would be more of them.

But no, I was on the 7:50 bus. Cause it was that or 11:30 in the category of "buses leaving before noon" and no way the 11:30 bus was going to make 110km in time for my 12:31 train.
As it was, the 7:50 bus barely did.

After some three hours on the bus, desperately needing to pee, and starting to get more than a little motion sick from the lurching and surging and stopping and starting that are the primary feature of one of the buses which is part of China's rural transportation and logistics system, I jumped off the bus and hailed a car through Didi. It was still another 40 minutes after that before I got to the train station.

On the train I napped in fits and starts. Never quite enough to actually count as getting rest, it was more that I wasn't really up for remaining conscious and these micro sleeps were helping me survive through to Beijing and the first cup of coffee.

Met Myf and a guy whose name I never got at Voyage Coffee near the Drum Tower so I could get more beans. I'm running low but I probably have at least three or four days left on the current supply. It's just that if I was going to be in Beijing, it behooved me to get more now. So I got more of the "Red Cherry" blend, a blend called "Zero" and a single-origin from Aceh.

I went from there straight to an early buffet dinner and Kol Nidre services at Kehillat Beijing. The multiple cans of Diet Coke I knocked back with dinner basically were just enough to keep me awake through the service and get me back to Myf's mom's old apartment without falling over my feet, injuring myself, or dropping anything irreplaceably important into a public toilet.