D25: 定州 → 定州

October 20, 2024

Taking a photo of the pagoda reflected in a Very Small Pond

Although he'll later on go and also leave Shijiazhuang hours before I arrive there I can't exactly blame Dr. M's colleague for not changing his schedule in order to meet someone who he has to know he'll eventually meet anyways. As a bit of an apology for not sticking around, he did go and tell the local Comprehensive Media Center that I'm around in order to make a video about Dingzhou being the 700th Chinese town I've spent the night in while on a bike tour¹, and I'll spend the morning touristing with them.

The only negative about doing anything with the people from the Dingzhou Media Center is that if I'd been paying to go to the local pagoda park instead of being treated as a guest, I would have paid for the right to go inside, climb up to the top, and look at the various primarily late-Qing murals. However, because they were treating me, we moved through places at the speed of trying to capture content of me enjoying these places in ways more akin to how normal tourists experience them.

Thinking myself clever I ordered a dish I'd never heard of only to have the boss tell me it was a local specialty from Suzhou

Also, and I'm not sure if this actually counts as a complaint about them, their having mommas that successfully taught them how to treat other people provided a harsh and immediate contrast with the people from the [deliberately not named] national media outlet that caught up to me in the early afternoon.

Being as this is my first time working with this specific media outlet and given that I've heard negative things said about the staff of organizations that I personally have good experiences with, I want to believe that everything I would see over this and the next two days is not corporate culture so much as it was a case of my having unfortunately been saddled with three highly inconsiderate and entitled people who fed off of and encouraged each other's bad behavior.

The adorable trio of media workers from Dingzhou

Stone Memorial Column made by the Japanese in commemorating the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

Even before the dismissive way they treated me started to get under my skin, the first thing I noticed was how they treated people who were much much lower status and from whom they weren't trying to get something.

These days, in addition to a huge reduction in offline petty theft, China has security cameras everywhere which, combined with the various camouflage measures² I've done to make my bike look "not expensive," (despite not making it any less expensive or stealable) are enough to make me willing to visit places where the only place I can leave it is a gated parking lot.

When part of the pagoda collapsed in the 19th century, it revealed an earlier pagoda inside it

In the morning, when I went to the pagoda with the trio from the local media center, they asked the security guards if it would be okay to put my bike in their staff parking. Then, when we went to the museum, as there was no fenced-off staff parking area and we were in the center of downtown, one of the women stayed outside and did work type stuff on her phone while sitting next to it.

After lunch, when the trio from [redacted] went back to the museum with me, they told the security guards at the entrance "you will watch her bike." This, nor them having me put the bike under the umbrella that's where the guards stay out of the sun and rain, would have made no lasting impression on me if we'd left the museum an hour later, or two hours later, or even three hours later.

Collection of plants that look just like one of the featured plants in "An Analysis of the Plant Imagery in the Nirvana Sutra Mural on the North Wall of Maijishan Cave 127" with the bonus feature that one of these artifacts includes the Buddha on his bier

However, we left well after the museum had already closed up around us, and the guards were left standing there waiting for me to come get my bike 20+ minutes after they were supposed to be off work. So—as the first in what would end up being a very long list of examples of displaying no respect for anyone and even less respect for people beneath them—it ended up making quite a deep impression on me.

After most of an hour pretending for the camera to look up hotels on Maps while sheltering from a sudden bone chilling drizzle, we went back to the same hotel where I'd spent the previous night. We chose this hotel because I liked the boss and staff, found it "comfortable enough" for the price, and had them insisting (up until after we were there and they were turning their noses up at how low class it was) that they were totally fine with "wherever [I] usually stay." Once there though the pattern of disregard and disrespect continued.

Leaving my bike with the security guards

Although I would be constantly horrified at the way they treated everyone else³, I think I did things like moving the hotel room furniture back into its original positions after they went to their rooms for the same reason I kept picking up their littered scraps of tape and packaging and putting them in my jersey pockets: not because I wanted other people to think good of me but because I just felt wrong leaving things that weren't mine that much of a mess.

Although this would gradually change as things progressed, my being the primary subject of their filming and the person who was going to be reaping the benefit of being on national TV meant that so long as they weren't insisting⁴ on anything dangerous⁵, I didn't initially give them any kind of push back⁶. On the one hand getting confrontational didn't seem likely to end up with any positives for me, while on the other correctly identifying where I was frustrated because of the very necessary repetitive repeating of the same action fifteen times from six different angles for four different lenses and where I was frustrated because they were assholes was kind of hard.

Me taking a photo of him taking a photo of me taking a photo

Furthermore, as the shittiest behavior mostly wasn't directed at me, it took a creeping while for me to go from "I can't believe they just did that" to "I should just tell them hell no" and by that point the filming was over.

¹ Factors like the not very large number of times I've camped or trying to decide how far one place in Beijing has to be from another place in Beijing before it counts as a second place means that this count is a bit fuzzy.

² For example, clickyclacks on the wheels, decorative rubber ducks, and three quarters of an inch of dried on mud.

³ As well as after the fact discomfort with the idea that the people who were being mistreated by them would mentally blame the Person Being Filmed instead of the Film Crew

Everything you need to know about them, summed up in one photo⁷

⁴ That's enough night time filming in the rain, my teeth won't stop chattering.

⁵ I don't care that you want a shot of my bike in the hotel room, this is a safe lobby and I am not carrying my bike up a set of stairs that narrow for love or money.

⁶ There was a C but ought to be D rated fast food restaurant across the street from the hotel which they thought us eating dinner at would make the boss willing to let us use it as a vantage point for a specific shot. I pushed for getting in their rental car and driving somewhere that didn't smell like a case of food poisoning.

Combining a GoPro on my rear panniers and a borrowed ebike to take video of me riding at night⁸

⁷

Furniture he and his spotter have recognized isn't steady enough to be stood on
Wearing outdoor shoes and not so much as a piece of newspaper to stand on.
Headphones dangling in my hair
Their colleague saw nothing wrong in photographing this on my phone

⁸ Notice how warmly they are dressed. Notice that the hotel owner's borrowed† ebike has a big windshield coat already attached for cold weather. Notice that they didn't think it was that chilly and didn't understand why I was so insistent on going indoors already.

† Of course they didn't pay her

Today's ride: 22 km (14 miles)
Total: 1,609 km (999 miles)

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