D43: 曲子 → 庆城

May 28, 2021

Great Grandson stayed up very late last night doing whatever it is people do when they come visiting their hometown after a while away (I'm guessing mahjongg, karaoke, alcohol, or a combination of all three) so I don't have someone to translate for me when I come by to visit the Matriarch come morning.

The family members that live with her on a daily basis are happy enough to see someone sitting with her making her happy (and more than a few photos are taken of my doing so) but they've got lives to be running around doing and aren't really interested in attempting to either help me ask her what life was like nor to answer.

In the 50s and 60s, this would have had Slogans on it

There's even a 为人民服务 (Serve the People) tastefully carved into the plinth

It probably doesn't help that, unlike Great Grandson (who reads English and who can kind of sort of slowly speak it), they also don't speak the world's greatest Modern Standard Mandarin so even though it isn't as hard for them as it is for Matriarch, it's still not easy for them to do more than basic communication with me.

After about an hour, during which time the weather is getting progressively hotter and both of my phones have overheated as I attempt to take video that can perhaps be transcribed at a later date by someone who speaks Gansu, I decide it's time to hit the road for what will ultimately be a fairly uneventful day of truck route biking.

Rather post modern style Oilfield Fire Prevention Brigade Guesthouse

It's a bit wider and not quite as trucky as it was farther north and there's a surprising amount of really cool architecture from the 80s and 90s to be seen along the Road but, by and large, it's a truck route. Even if it's a pretty green truck route with dramatic mountains and a stunning blue sky, it's still a truck route.

One simply doesn't have the energy to detour up a short hill to see if a temple is unlocked when one knows that any solitude or interesting experiences at the temple will be followed by having to get back on the truck route.

A shrine outside a locked temple in one of the townlets had some amazing murals

On the plus side, not only is it a mostly downhill truck route, the ongoing construction of the almost finished expressway tells me that whenever I next get around to coming back this way, it will be a truckless route.

Having passed up some not very appealing looking possible lunch places in some sad townlets that seem to have once been coal mines or something else petrochemical that involves large apparently no longer used buildings and "environmental remediation" projects, I was just about ready to start looking for someplace relatively quiet to park myself for a while while I ate the fruit that Granny's family had given me when I stumbled across an ongoing Temple Fair.

Literally the only still photo I got of the Fair on my phone (and thus easily shareable in a prompt fashion) was the Epidemic Prevention Sign In Sheet so that contact tracing could be done if anyone turned up sick

I cannot think of a single time in China that I have been so thoroughly photographed as I was at this Fair¹. My favorite (and I use this term very loosely) was the stall which gave² me a free bowl of mutton noodles (that I really didn't have room for after the cotton candy or the fried chicken or the nectarines) and who then wanted to do a bunch of video shorts of me with them for their Kuaishou³ and who, instead of adding music to the finished product like everyone else in China, had a full size speaker which they had to turn on at rather ear splitting volume.

Even if the rest of the day hadn't been a return to the Truck Route, I'm not sure anything else could have compared.

At one time in the 90s this was the fanciest building for miles around

Possibly, even when the broken windows, still is

¹ As a general rule, when people aren't flinching away from me in terror because I might be a disease vector, the current treatment I get as a foreigner in the countryside is more like things were 20 years ago than anything recent. And it's not just the stupid straw hat cause I not only had the hat last year, I'm also just as likely to get enthusiastic handshakes and "please please please please please can I take a photo with you?" as the aforementioned flinching away in terror.

That for some reason are only 24 hours a day in the summer

²So, actually it was someone from over near the Opera stage who gave me a ticket marked for exchange at the mutton noodle stall as good for one bowl of noodles.

³ A TikTok competitor

Today's ride: 59 km (37 miles)
Total: 1,578 km (980 miles)

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