The word "halal", originally written in Arabic, along with a cookie cutter image of a mosque has been excised from the Muslim noodle shop's sign. It's not the first time I've seen this (that would be yesterday) and I'm pretty sure it isn't going to be the last, but the violence with which it was done is yet another scattered data point in the collection of anecdotes that places where I have trouble are also places where the citizens' relationship with Law & Order isn't so good either.

Tonight, I'm in a different county, and I'll resume the practice of starting my evening at the police station. They'll be friendly, gregarious, helpful. They'll know, from my fuzzy description, the hotel I went to the last time I was in town, and they'll let me know it closed since Covid. Then, without arguing with me about the sort of places I ought to want to stay, they'll try sending me to something in my desired price range¹.

And if there are banners on the outside of the Mosque about loving the nation or people of all ethnicities being one family, there are also banners on the outside of the Daoist Temple to learn from the history of the Party.

But maybe I have cause and effect mixed up. Maybe the ham-handed enforcement of opaque extralegal unwritten rules and a tendency towards being assholes is the result of community strife rather than the cause.

Yeah, maybe not.

I do a reasonably good job of finding and photographing everything of interest I pictated nine years ago. I'm most astonished by the one little temple just below the place where there used to be a toll gate. If I hadn't known for certain it was in the process of being newly built nine years ago, I'd be hard pressed to believe it that young. So much love and money was clearly being poured into it at the time of construction, you'd think someone would have weather sealed the wood.

It wasn't a particularly interesting road last time and it isn't a particularly interesting road this time. Traffic is both better and worse. I'm actually quite surprised, given the existence of an expressway, just how many trucks there are. I manage to pedal up climbs that I know I walked but that could just as easily be lower gearing or the rest day I just had as it could be the breathing problems I'm not having.

The person who'd been nagging to ask again and again when I'm going to be getting to Yanguan doesn't respond now that I'm actually close to Yanguan and won't respond until around 3am and I can't decide if this is a case of just being incredibly lame or a case of not actually knowing what to do when the stranger you follow online answers you. 

In any case, the lack of a free meal didn't particularly affect me as I'd had a decent amount of fruit throughout the day, hadn't been super hungry when arriving, and had eventually decided (rather than leaving my fourth floor hotel room) to eat savory oatmeal and Russian style sausage from my panniers.

¹ I actually end up rather unhappily at someplace that I consider the low end of trying to be nicer rather than the high end of poor and it shows, but metrics like not wanting to stay somewhere with a cheap boss are much harder to explain.