西安→靖边

May 14, 2021

You can't really tell in this picture but the tops of all the streetlights on Yulin's Airport Road are decorated with 3d cartoon jets

The closest airport (either backtracking or heading in the wrong direction) to Jingbian is over 150km away and the weather was making it so that fully a third of my days theoretically on Tour were spent indoors. Also, I had someone willing to keep my stuff for me.

I know why I picked this city. But shit is it a pain to get to.

With the stews giving me snacks and water for my next flight, I assume that it's a budget airline. However, there is no business class / economy divide and I'm pretty sure that that one time in 2007 when I ended up with a domestic business class ticket, the seats weren't as nice as these.

I don't have my preferred right hand window seat but the flight is a third empty and, either for being handicapped or for my ticket class, I'm way up at the front and no one is sitting next to the leg which is now swollen enough that everyone simply assumes that "barely being able to walk" is my default rather than the result of special conditions.

I probably ought to wear a compression stocking but I feel that the Temporarily Abled¹ are more likely to treat me well when it's a clearly visible rather than a mostly invisible handicap.

The driver whose phone number I was given for regular service between Yulin and Jingbian had seemed slow to understand things when I called from Xi'an and he isn't much better when he calls me shortly after I'm on the ground. After the third phone call with him, the wheelchair attendant takes my phone from me to talk with him in dialect.

When you have a nice wide shoulder like this on a nice wide road like this one, you really shouldn't drift into the car lanes. My clearly impaired driver wasn't paying attention at all and very nearly hit her.

Once he arrives though I'm pretty sure it was less a logistics issue and more that he was high on something which, among other things, means that he keeps clearing his throat with loud honking noises.

I haven't yet paid when he drops me at a smaller van that, unlike his, doesn't have an official sign from the Transportation Authority marking it as licensed for the Yulin↔ Jingbian route. It's smaller, and all but one of the seats have already been filled, but I don't care and I gladly move over.

It's about a 90 minute drive to from here to Jingbian. Even before it gets completely dark, I can't see much.

In terms of carsickness, heat regulation, and ability to see the scenery, I'd rather be in the front. In terms of not being in that driver's van, I'm happy with the back.

Most notable thing, perhaps, is the windsock on every bridge letting me know that they must get some pretty serious wind at times. There's also, just about the time we hit city limits and start going here and there to drop everyone off, a store called 文革批发 that must be owned by someone born in the 1960s as I can't imagine any other way than 文革 being the owner's name for the Bureau of Industry and Commerce to allow a shop to be called "Cultural Revolution Wholesalers".

4:30am to 9:45pm bed to bed.

Apparently it was a popular name in this area as, four days later, I came across a similarly named Vegetables Shop

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¹ As with there being a social divide between people who consider themselves "deaf" and those who consider themselves "Deaf", there are also people who capitalize the D in disabled². I admit to not spending much time in handicapped advocacy spaces since moving to China but it's from there that I learned to call myself a cripple³ or to refer to the rest of you as the Temporarily Abled⁴.

² Some congenitally handicapped people don't even want to be called disabled as it indicates that they are something broken that couldn't be fixed.

³ I challenge you to find me a better word for clearly conveying the fact that I am physically broken and permanently need a (mostly invisible) mobility aid to walk.

⁴ Either you die young or you eventually get old. Even if you never get injured, never have cancer, or a brain aneurysm, or the lingering effects of a bad bout of pneumonia, you will still eventually find yourself of an age where the ramps, the elevators, the reasonable distribution of benches, and the options for clearer text or subtitles will matter. You may be "abled" right now as opposed to "disabled" but, even if you don't want to think about it, it's still a temporary thing.

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