D28: 东岭→泉州

November 5, 2019

Just a man, out for a walk, with his elephant

The wind today was insane. I thought the wind yesterday along the seashore (particularly after I was no longer shielded by the sea wall) was bad. But today's wind was like nothing I had ever experienced before.

On the rare occasion that the wind was behind me, it was like being pushed by an invisible hand. There were a few times ever, particularly on bridges, when I simply stopped pedaling, and despite the fact that I was going uphill, was still able to maintain a speed of around 16kph. This, of course, meant that when I crested the hill and was now going downhill that I had to spend a great deal of energy on keeping the bike at reasonable not passing cars type speeds.

I haven't experienced wind like this since 2015 when the idiot I will never sail with again was dumb enough to take a small sailboat with insufficient supplies out into the Bay of Biscay, returned to a port just a little bit down the coastline, resupplied, and did it again. Then, after we got becalmed for two days and were made extremely aware of our neither having the supplies nor the boat for crossing the Bay, we got into a storm. At least with this wind, I was merely miserable and tired but didn't have any reason to be afraid I was going to die.

Getting the sole of my right sneaker re-glued because the lift is trying really hard to fall off.

Multilingual orthography as a way of expressing Chinese concepts is one of my pet interests. The article by Victor Mair on the subject is a good place to start.

Our Baby has lived to one month! Yay! PARTY TIME. (Seriously, this is when babies are traditionally named, because they might not make it to one month.)

There's two more sets of three lanes the other side of the far visible median

There may or may not have been the possibility of smaller roads between me and Quanzhou. Certainly, I got the impression that there were a lot of paved and unpaved connections between here and there.

However, I had a couchsurfing host lined up for Quanzhou and a back-translation project scheduled for Corporate Client and it seemed reasonable to focus on getting my butt into a city so I could work and earn enough to justify my habit of spending nearly as much time on vacation as not on vacation.

Back translation which can be done when the client wants to double check the quality of their language service provider but which is usually a type of work usually done for multinational companies where they ask to have something which was already translated (which was edited by the foreign country office after translation was finished, or which was written by the foreign country office in the first place) to be translated back into the source language to confirm that the content is correct and meets brand standards.

I didn't actually take a look at this temple because the wind was too crazy and I knew that if I went down the little slope to look at it, I would have to go back up the slope into the wind. However, because I pulled off to the side to make a decision not to go in to the temple, I found a better road to use.

What is it with only demolishing half a building? Note that the flooring is also slabs of granite.

Mixed new and old style construction in a single building

These little guys kind of remind me of the decorative ceramic wall squirrels that were a thing in Baltimore when I was growing up

I have never had a back translation job that wasn't, at least in some respects, interesting. It might have been really dull content (corporate training seminars, ugh) but the bits it revealed about topics I barely knew existed (let alone knew I was interested in) made it very worthwhile.

This general region between Putian and Quanzhou is full of old buildings (or at least old looking buildings). I haven't seen any rammed earth buildings since up on the mountain a few days ago and the wooden structures vaguely reminiscent of Vietnam in style and construction have all but disappeared to be replaced by stone and brick buildings. It's hard to tell sometimes which of the stone buildings are actually old though as more than a few clearly very modern buildings (at least in terms of style) are built with the same heavy granite slabs.

Sometimes, a building will start out with the first and maybe second floor being built of stone and then subsequent floors being built with more modern materials. The stone work ranges from simple blocks cut and laid the same as cinderblock, to long narrow pieces anywhere from a meter to two meters in length by perhaps 4-6" in height, to a jumble of angles that clearly took a huge amount of skill to cut and lay.

A very traditional looking well. Built in 1987.

Coming soon, a lane to go with those lane markers.

Imagine this following you up a hill only slightly faster than you can bike

Since I'm mostly out on the main road and I'm constantly fighting the wind, I don't have the energy to really be looking at all the buildings, particularly as there are a lot of them, and while they may be distinctively different enough to be interesting to see as I go by, they generally aren't interesting enough to stop and photograph or really spend that much effort remembering.

(Of course, since stopping means starting again and starting again means risking that I'll be blown into traffic, I have other reasons not to stop.)

I get one break in the town in I think the town of Dongyuan [东园] though it may have been Zhangban [张坂] when the road and the GPS drop me into the middle of town and want me to make a left turn or at least a u-turn where there is now a barrier down the center that's been judiciously blocked in such a way as to allow pedestrians but not anything with wheels. Trying to find my way past the barrier leads me into the alleys on my side of the road and what was obviously the 19th century center of town. Perhaps half of the actually old buildings were replaced at some time in the past century but, because they were replaced piecemeal, it's still very obvious that this market street was once Market Street.

I'm beginning to realize that this style of building is all over Asia

Impressive temple just off Market Street

From Market Street, I end up on a little passage that takes me to a very pretty temple where I don't get nearly as many pictures as I want of all the interesting things going on because people keep coming and going to burn incense and pray and throw fortune telling sticks and it's just not right to get in their way or to take pictures of them doing stuff like that unless they've agreed first.

Maybe they would agree if I'd ask them but just as likely they might not, and as I wouldn't want to be bothered if I were in their position, I do my best to respect them and stay out of the way.

After that, with a short detour to find some way to cross the road that hasn't been blocked off to keep motorcycles from crossing the road, it's back out into the wind.

And now, because I'm getting closer to the city, I'm also starting to get increased amounts of traffic to deal with. In general, the traffic is polite and I don't mind it but, at the same time, the gusting wind has me convinced that I'm going to be blown into traffic if I lose my concentration for even a moment and it's a tense ride.

Images from stories and parables that would, presumably, be familiar to the people visiting the temple

Give a man fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set him on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

By the time I'm getting close to my host's, even though it's barely 3pm, and even with a long break for lunch, and a long slow wander of some crumbling ancient housing just off of his main streets while waiting for him to respond to my messages, I'm so very very ready to call it a day.

Of course, since Quanzhou seems to be one of the Chinese cities which did not get the memo that was issued five or eight years ago about increasing the number of public toilets, part of my being very ready to call it a day is because I had spent the last hour or so looking and looking and looking for somewhere to pee in the suburban areas, and by the time the pressure had gotten bad enough that I would have considered a reasonably obstructing car as a shield, I was rather definitely in the urban areas and still couldn't find anywhere to go to the bathroom.

In point of fact, the visit through the interesting crumbling areas happened because I saw the distinctive shape of old rooflines, thought that they kind of sort of looked like they might be a temple complex (they weren't) and had hoped that the temple would have toilets (except for, you know, not being a temple).

When I get to my host's, the only reason I'm not doing the pee-pee dance is because I stopped drinking an hour earlier in the hopes that my dehydrated body would sweat out some of the water currently occupying my bladder.

He's a international trader from Iraq dealing in the shoe business who likes to ride his motorcycle all over the place. Because he has less than stellar Chinese, is distinctly more brown than I am, is not an American, and comes from a country whose name is almost (but not quite) the same as a truly disfavored country, he has experienced plenty of NFAs in the five or six years he's been in and out of China. Even on business trips trying to stay at nice hotels.

Hopefully, the knowledge that they really aren't supposed to be doing that will help with his future travel in China while living in China. It's hard to say though since it takes a special kind of belligerent asshole to refuse to back down and get all up in the front desk staff's (or the police's) faces until they cave and just sell me a room already and I've noticed that most people find it really hard to be that aggressively mean.

One of the nicer buildings that wasn't a temple

That seems to be collecting Mobikes for some reason

We go out for dinner at a place behind his apartment and he insists on paying for me even though I feel that, as his guest, I ought to be paying for him. I'll do my best to make up for this by making him coffee in the morning and trying to help with (getting my assistant to research the answers to) some of his standard (and not so standard) foreigner frustrations but it's definitely one of those couchsurfing experiences where, especially since I don't get very many surfers, I end up feeling almost like I took advantage of the host's generosity.

He was okay with this though and it's obviously better than one of those alternatives where being hosted is worse than spending money but it still leaves me feeling out of balance in terms of karma.

I need to go find someone random and be nice to them for a change.

Today's ride: 51 km (32 miles)
Total: 1,728 km (1,073 miles)

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