Today was not a pleasant day. It wasn't an unpleasant day either, it just wasn't pleasant. The day's lack of pleasantness wasn't at all helped along by the ever so barely noticeable slow leak on my front tire making things mushy and difficult while, at the same time, being just slow enough for me to convince myself that I wasn't on the way to getting a flat tire.

Mostly it was just boring. No particularly interesting detours and lots of not so very well signposted roads with intersections of sufficiently similar quality that I constantly had to be stopping and checking the electronic maps to see if this was a turn I was supposed to make or not.

Really the only part of my day that was any kind of exceptional was lunch with the cadres. I was coming up on one of those likely to be not at all interesting Patriotic Education Bases that appeared to have had the translation of the name mangled because instead of 王震井纪念园 being called The Memorial Garden of Wang Zhenjin in English, it was called the Memorial Garden of Wang Zhen's Well and it was obvious that this was a case of someone translating one of the characters in a person's name as a word.

Research done after the fact indicates that, no, it actually is the Memorial Garden of Wang Zhen's Well. That there is a well there and that said well is associated with General Wang Zhen. Considering that this area is facing desertification and was already pretty dry even 50 years ago, drinking water wells are actually kind of important. In point of fact, I recently noticed that, at least in this area of China, my paper maps include known drinking water wells and springs. 

Although they are intended for civilian usage and can be bought freely from ordinary bookstores, my paper maps are made by a military publishing house. This means that they are very accurate. It also means that the information included on them tends to be the sort of information you'd get if you were sending military surveyors out on practice surveying trips. For example, as I discovered last year when traveling in an area with somewhat more water, the marking for a "ferry" does not actually indicate that a given location has a "ferry". Instead, it indicates that a given location's docked boats are large enough that they could potentially be commandeered for troop movements.

While I was at the Memorial Garden, all I really did was eat lunch. I didn't actually visit anything. This is why I didn't find out about it actually referencing an actual well until I was getting ready to write this entry.

I was passing by but not yet to the entrance to the parking lot when I noticed that an awful lot of the people clustered around one of the buildings were dressed in Robin's Egg blue copies of the uniforms worn by the Eighth Route Army. Not that actual members of the Eighth Route Army would have had such beautifully blue uniforms with such a uniform shade of very artificial dye but I digress and I had to go and find out why some thirty or forty apparent adults were all playing dress up.

(In the US, I go to SCA events, the Ren Faire, Fairy Fest, and science fiction conventions. I cannot and will not say or think anything negative about adults playing dress up. I just needed to know why.)

They were government employees of some danwei (never found out which one but I suspect police or public security bureau of some sort based on the nice warm POLICE sweater vest one of the guys had on underneath his far-too-thin-for-this-weather costume) having the government employee equivalent of corporate team building training exercises only with an extra dose of patriotism thrown in for good measure. All dressed up like the Eighth Route Army and cooking over kitchen fires the way people from the Eighth Route Army would have done sixty years ago (or how some poor rural people were still doing last week).

They invited me to join them for lunch. Despite it being much too early for lunch even on a day when I hadn't just had breakfast, this was an offer I couldn't refuse.

I then turned the charm up to eleven and made sure that I did everything in my power to make what was very likely the only interaction most of them had had with an American a memorably pleasant one. I said nice things about China, avoided saying not nice things about China, praised the stuff I liked about their province and delicately avoided the conversation about Trump's Trade War. It's actually quite difficult avoiding hot button topics when you are talking to educated people who know information about those topics and who would actively like to get more information from a source which is either unbiased or, at the very least, known to be biased differently from their normal sources.

Really, after all that, how could the rest of the day be interesting?