D28: 正定 → 石家庄

October 23, 2024

Considering how often I picked up bits of tape that they peeled off my bike and just dropped on the ground, I should have noticed that the TV crew had left tape on my bike and I should have wondered why.

Considering the insistence that he surely wasn't responsible for the new hole in my new bag, and that we hadn't been using the headtube GoPro mount for at least a couple rounds of riding down the road at that point, I'm also quite uncharitably inclined to think it wasn't an accident that they "forgot" to tell me that they'd ripped my mount off (or that they'd done a bang up job of reattaching it with tape that, left on overnight, did even more damage to my paint job than just ripping the mount off did on its own).

It's kind of like a slightly less gummy duck tape, but whatever was in that glue, being left on my frame overnight was not good for it

And yes, they had been told how much my bike costs

It looks like they managed to both rip the stickum from the frame (and reattach it with a piece of their tape folded over) and similarly rip and reattach the GoPro mount from the stickum.

My general dismay at them for being such dreadful people has now reached quite a simmering boil that I don't really know how to resolve. If I openly complain about them in ways that identify their network or I track down their bosses and complain to them, I fear that I risk my program not going live and putting up with their shit will have been for nought.

Oatmeal with raisins and powdered milk in the room for breakfast again. This time it's a combination of my not wanting to be outside during breakfasting time and the more of it I eat, the less of it I will have to carry on the train.

A locked up 19th Century Catholic Monastery that was possibly still being used in some capacity as recently as 20 years ago

My burning desire to find out what these stelae say is tempered by not wanting to bother with the effort of finding anyone to unlock the gate

A locked up 19th century Catholic Monastery

There were no obvious ways in to the courtyard that weren't already carefully blocked off

If only I'd known I'd be suddenly hitting a "Not Fun Anymore" wall of "time to go home," I wouldn't have gone shopping in Gao'yang.

Among a prairie blue sky that speaks positively of pollution controls and negatively of lost jobs, it's a super easy ride into Shijiazhuang marked by absolutely nothing that I recognize.

Even places that I recognize (like the old central train station) have changed for the brighter and cleaner, with the 1907 stone bridge in front of the Liberation Memorial now open to the public amid a giant ungated park¹.

Sweet potato chips where every attempt to understand the price was wrong²

I see a 7-11 so I purchase the Coca Cola Oreos that everyone's been talking about and eat one of them before discarding them to a jersey pocket to be given away at the first opportunity to someone with less refined taste buds³.

Then I go and wait at a fruit shop near Joy and Ridge's place for them to get off work, navigate rush hour, and meet me for dinner.

¹ Getting accidentally locked in to People's Park at night with my then boyfriend is a Core Shijiazhuang Memory

² And then, after I switched from underpaying him to overpaying him, he tried to give me more to make up for it

³ Sorry, Silas .... I don't know if you finished the Oreos because you didn't like dinner or because you have that skinny guy ability to nom down a thousand calories without much noticeable effect, but this very much does mean you

Today's ride: 34 km (21 miles)
Total: 1,717 km (1,066 miles)

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