Over the past few years, although there have been many (many) days where I took my not actually wanting to get out of bed (on account of reasons ranging from weather to exhaustion) and combined it with my needing to do paying work. However, and although I can go over my journals and check, I feel like its been a very long time since I've had a day where my sole reason for staying in the hotel room was work.

Although the weather report maintains that today will be just as gloomy and rain filled as yesterday was, it's a brilliant sunny day with a gorgeous blue sky.

However, as I spent all day yesterday enjoying myself with conversation, story telling, and story listening, I don't get to go outside or do anything that isn't typing and translating until nearly 5pm.

This is my own fault and, no matter how much I'd like to complain, I can't.

When I am released from the prison of "being a responsible adult", I head over to the bike shop so that I can talk route some and so that I can move my bike and panniers to the hotel. The only site I rather definitely want to visit in Cheng is one which was shared to me as a "oh, please go here" video from a follower on TikTok but its a good 5 or 8 kilometers in the direction I'm not traveling tomorrow, and the bike shop isn't very busy right now, and Zhang has never been there. 

Cheng is his hometown and although he's an explorative curious kind of guy, he's got a bike shop to run now and, until recently, was always somewhere else being an athlete.

We have no particular problem in finding the stone sheep and the thing that used to be a lion but which now looks rather a lot more like an abstract frog or a dolphin. The horses take more effort. They require walking around in a search pattern and finding people to ask who are mostly "oh yeah, the stone horses, yeah, those are around here somewhere" before we eventually come across them at the back side of an orchard.

Then, back to town, my failing to successfully treat anyone to dinner, my going for dumplings that tasted good but were probably the culprit in the next day's upset stomach, and the hotel.