D49: 泾川 → 四十里铺

June 3, 2021

Court was today and I seem to have won. However, it's a bit of a Pyrrhic Victory as it looks like the awarded compensation is going to be less than my legal bills.

This had me in a right shit mood and I ended up skipping the county's Big Temple and Big Museum as my heart just wasn't in it.

Riding west towards Pingliang City, I mostly stuck to the north side of the Jingwei River as that road is the smallest of the ones running through the valley¹ and the most likely to have anything interesting for me to see.

And the written names of the Five from a shrine whose people didn't have the money for Art

This is Nameless Bridge #22. I was amused.

I did do a stretch of about 10 or 15km on the south side of the river after coming down that way to find myself brunch in a town whose main business seemed to be a very creepy rose-colored view of Educated Youth being sent "down to the countryside" and "up to the mountains" to "learn from the common man" and would discover that, having been usurped by the expressway, this formerly Main Route wasn't nearly so bad as it had looked like it was going to be when I was leaving Jingchuan.

Let's celebrate one of the worst periods in modern history by pretending that none of the bad stuff happened

However, as soon as I found myself another bridge, it was back to the north of the river where people were threshing grain, where propaganda slogans with non-standard characters mentioned policies 20 years gone by, and where I saw what can only be described as the most unique drinking fountain.

(The video of my unique drinking fountain currently has 3.1 million views on Douyin so I'm far from being the only person who finds it amusing or strange.)

Do you see the Mao head painted on the pagoda?

This might be a bit more obvious. Not sure if the damage around the eyes is weathering or intentional

Just as a gargoyle is a figured grotesque statue used to hide drainspouts on medieval European architecture, Chinese architecture often has dragon heads on drainspouts. For what may or may not be a related reason, when a spring or fountain is particularly enthusiastic about producing water, it's also most often decorated as a dragon's head.

As a result, the etymological source of the word "faucet" (水龙头) in Chinese is literally "water spitting dragon's head".

The ... uh .... head that this water was coming from was a bit more ... human .... shall we say. But, not like a "head" head of the sort of head that has a mouth. More like a certain famous statue in Brussels.

Shaped vaguely like a 4 or 5 year old boy and decorated with a hat and a neckerchief, it wasn't even a very good statue either.

Something on birth control policies for people who aren't resident at their permanent address and "When roads are paved, fortune comes"

I've never seen that fourth character written that way

With the weather being as nice as it was and there being lots of trees around and my riding the high of lots and lots and lots of people liking me, I decided I could bravely do this whole "camping" thing and, after a nice meal of fried mutton noodles and a jar of peaches in syrup, set off to find myself a nice grove where I would learn about minimum trunk size for hammocks and the importance of trees not being in loose soil.

I'd also confirm that, despite what the weather report says, it still gets very very cold at night.

¹ There's an expressway, a railroad, and a national road that's also numbered as a scenic provincial road

It looks like I did a decent job setting up. Looks would be deceiving.

Today's ride: 59 km (37 miles)
Total: 1,853 km (1,151 miles)

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