I-4: 洛阳

August 7, 2021

We got up nice and early and took a taxi to McDonald's for Sausage McMuffins and McDonald's coffee. I generally don't see the point in coffee from McDonald's (even with Kahlua added) but Margaret is a fan, and I have to admit that if you order the "snow top" coffee with the soft serve ice cream and then add Kahlua, it's almost a worthwhile drink¹.

I eat McDonald's rather more than I ought to because the dollar meal equivalent cheeseburgers just hit the spot in ways no other western restaurant in Hainan manages and, being as it is like the only place in China I know to have proper English muffins, if they served breakfast later than 10, I'd probably be doing a fair number of Sausage McMuffins².

Fed and full of alcoholic coffee, we grabbed another taxi to the Grottoes, the lack of traffic on the streets in that area of the city meaning nothing to us as we don't know how much traffic there is supposed to be on an early Saturday morning.

CLOSED

And, while I could say it's very Chinese of them to have given us (well, Tyra) attitude over our inability to find the notice that they didn't post on their website (it was posted on government websites), I've had a friend in the States dealing with very similar things these past few months when it comes to the TNR³ of his garage cats such that he eventually needed to use a Humane Society in a different area of town.

Brainstorming with the taxi driver (starting, obviously, from things farther away and more likely to get him a big fare) we go over places that we know or don't know the closed status of and eventually pick the Guanlin Temple and Tomb of the General Guan Yu who became the God Guan Yu.

And, it's open! At least today anyways. I gather from the amount of stuff that closed the next day that it probably wouldn't have been open then. In terms of "great places to visit", it's better than Zhougong though, given that Luoyang has the Emperor Carriage Museum and the Longmen Grottoes, it's totally not a worthwhile Destination Level site for Luoyang.

But, it's open. And, there's even a very friendly 9 year old (apparently belonging to one of the shops) who shows us all the best stuff like the turtle pond and a spider eating a fly.

From there we go to the municipal museum where, thankfully, the system that requires preregistration but doesn't let foreigners preregister means that foreigners can come without an appointment. I get the wheelchair with the least flat tires and am reminded somewhere around the second kilometer of pushing myself that it's been a great many years since I've regularly been in a 'chair and my upper body strength is shit.

Then, back to the hotel for more booze and charcuterie followed by an Adventure in getting a massage (silly Margaret tried to make an appointment at a spa quality place) that not only ends up with them refusing us (first appointment didn't go through and the appointment at their sister site was cancelled cause we're dirty foreigners) but ends up with us going around the corner to another kind of place I'd never go to for massage and which almost definitely is actually a whorehouse.

The massages weren't bad. If they'd been given by cute men dressed as provocatively as our masseuses, we probably would have even considered them good

¹ I feel, if you removed the coffee from this equation, and just had McDonald's soft serve and Kahlua, it would also be worthwhile.

² I don't get Sausage Egg McMuffins though because that's a much harder menu item to find on the Chinese menu and my brain is nor ready for that level of early morning difficulty. Even with multinationals, I generally find English menu options in China to be harder than the Chinese. Margaret had an egg on her muffin and, like all good friends, mocked me for my egglessness.

³ Trap, Neuter, Release

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