It's still raining outside.

The kind of rain that (even if I weren't in a low rise building inside a wannabe mixed use commercial business complex focusing on local handicrafts and therefore have no city noise nearby) muffles all the city noise.

It's not a heavy pouring rain like a typhoon or the afternoon rains that happen in Haikou in the Spring but it's heavy enough. And cold. The kind of rain where your layers of thermal tights and thermal jersey and windbreaker just help to keep you from getting chilled but you still strip off everything at the end of the day and take lots of hot showers and bundle under the blankets shivering in the hopes that you haven't gotten sick.

So even though I didn't ride yesterday (or maybe because I made coffee at 5pm?), I sleep until noon before eventually going out and calling a Didi to take me to a massage place. Can't actually find that massage place when I get out of the car so I put in my search terms again and walk until I do find something, blind massage, in a part of town that scratches my mental itch of looking familiar but its probably only familiar looking because late 20th century middle of nowhere Chinese cities all kind of look the same. (It's actually the same street as the hotel I'm not staying at and, if I read my 2012 journal right, may even be the same blind massage place.)

Then the bike shop to pay my laughably small bill.

Two spokes.
Wheel truing.
A new tire.
Two new pairs of brake pads.

CNY 300. 

Taking things apart and cleaning them and regreasing them isn't even on the bill. That just sort of happened because it was a slow rainy day and things were there that could be taken apart, and how else do you get to look inside interesting things if you don't take them apart?

I've been between the bike shop and the hostel enough by now that I'm planning on walking it but there's a grocery store only a block or three from the bike shop and by the time I've finished with the grocery store, trying to carry things would be inconvenient enough that I end up getting a Didi after all.