D42: 洪得 → 曲子

May 27, 2021

I spend a significant amount of the morning talking with the owner of the hotel I spent the night in. He's got a daughter in college who is apparently very good at foreign languages and thinks she might want to be a translator.

Now, I love being a translator. I get to do and see and read all kinds of amazing things (and quite a few boring ones, but let's not talk about those) and get paid to do it. It's awesome (except when it isn't, but let's not talk about that). Furthermore, although my work hours are painfully erratic, my rate of pay as a professional ranges from the merely "pretty decent" (around $25/hr for massive jobs with lots of hours) to the "extravagantly absurd" (even if it was only two hours, one of the rush jobs I did this month netted me roughly $700/hr).

I've reached a part of China where in-home plumbing hasn't yet reached all the homes and bathhouses are still a thing

However, most translation in China is paid at rates where even a person living rent free (who is otherwise taking the job for the opportunities they hope it will bring in the future) would find it difficult to make enough money to eat.

Part of why the crazy good rates exist at the top end of the market is because the meat grinder end of the market chews up and spits out potentially qualified people before they have a chance to discover you can actually get paid Real Money. Then, because people who are crazy talented at languages tend to also be crazy talented at other things, they go off to other careers.

Sure half the people are unmasked and they're really crowding up close but vaccination is apparently been opened up to the public in Gansu

So, not only is it highly unlikely that I'd be able to offer her an internship, if she's as good as her Dad thinks she is, I don't think she should even start with trying to enter my field. Instead, she should do something else entirely where—as the person with the best English—her boss keeps dropping the translation tasks on her until she's got enough experience to aim for the middle and upper range clients.

Hotel owner looks about my age so it seems strange to me that he could have a college age daughter but it's recently been pointed out to me that my Best Beloved and I have been dating for 22 years now so it's something that could have been possible if I had gone down a completely different life path (and had the slightest iota of maternal instinct or desire to have children).

Just about to finish their 6 month Tour following the route of the Long March

In grousing about the previous day's weather, I'm told that this is actually a substantial improvement over the past 5 years as 退耕还林 (rewilding farmland as forest) and anti-desertification measures (such as tree planting) have really taken off. Before, there were even more days with crazy wind and those days were always yellow with grit in the air.

Other recent improvements to the area include the high speed rail, the under construction expressway, and a massive water line from way uphill in Ningxia that means that they no longer have to store rainwater in cisterns for things like drinking and showering.

The content is mid to late 90s. The clothing is late 70s to early 80s if urban though could be late 90s depending on how rural an area is

Finally leave the hotel around 10:45 for a mostly uneventful day along the truck route. There are occasional bits of interesting architecture (in particular the yaodong around here are completely different from Shaanxi yaodong) but the combination of my having to Share the Road and a general downhill trend of going a bit faster than I might otherwise be doing means that random stops for the sake of stopping aren't really on my itinerary.

There's a late Ming / early Qing tomb of two brothers who were both generals, and a detour to look at the Huan City Walls, and a funny bit on a back road where a dog was eating some roadkill next to a speed bump and ignoring the driver honking at it to move for long enough that he got out of the car to shoo it off, but that's really it.

No bridges, no temples, not even any interesting propaganda until almost at the end of the day.

PSB lady from the County had spent multiple occasions throughout the day reminding me not to forget to start the night at the police station so, even though the matriarch¹ of the restaurant where I had dinner invited me to stay overnight, I had to double back to the police station instead.

Once again, they had no idea I was coming.

I didn't want to go to the most expensive hotel in town and an officer eventually decided on a place for me which, for 80y, had both an elevator and one of the most comfortable beds I've ever slept in.

Where things got weird though wasn't the decision to add photographing me (both outside the hotel and outside my room) to the idea that "too much data is better than too little" but was instead my waking up at around 2am to the sounds of someone outside my door having a one sided conversation over a radio before hearing footsteps down the hall and the elevator opening.

It was definitely a radio and not a cellphone. The sounds of conversation were what woke me and the static of a radio was what got me all the way awake. Cause mostly, in China, while people that aren't the police sometimes use radios to communicate in very special very specific circumstances, this wasn't any of those.

¹ An 88 year old great granny with bound feet, she gave birth 11 times to 6 children who survived childhood

Today's ride: 71 km (44 miles)
Total: 1,519 km (943 miles)

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