There are three reasons why my visits to Shijiazhuang are inevitably rushed and short.

1. I'm on a bike trip and I want to keep going
2. Joy and Ridge won't let me pay for anything and I feel like a leech.
3. Their daughter's bed is astonishingly uncomfortable. 

They know the first. They probably think my frustration over how many times they've treated me without ever once coming to Hainan and giving me the opportunity to treat them is politeness. And directly telling them the third would be horrible and ungrateful¹.

Faced with these three things, the person in charge over at Large Media Client who annually listens to me say "don't let my holidays interfere with my work" and then proceeds to mostly not give me any work while I'm on holiday being aware that I've stopped biking, and a dearth of wearable outfits² suitable for the weather and the knowledge that I really need to caffeine-up and sit down with Dr. M's book for a week of typing all come together with me buying a train ticket for tomorrow night.

I'll have time to join Joy and her mother-in-law at the traditional "I'm in Shijiazhuang" visit to a western restaurant where I'll be pleasantly surprised to discover that the city has finally internationalized to the point that I like the western food, to go to the surprisingly good³ Revolutionary History Museum that the old train station has been turned into, to walk along the pedestrianized shopping street that used to be grubby wholesalers and is now chic restaurants, but that's about it.

Do I regret not going to the Provincial Museum? Regret not visiting the other people I know I'm Shijiazhuang? Regret not staying long enough that people I know who are away on various things have gotten back?

Of course I do. 

But it's Shijiazhuang and I'll probably be back next year or no later than the year after that, and I'm cold, and Hainan is warm, and the idea of a night in my own bed⁴ is calling to me...

--

¹ Letting them know that they are mentioned in this journal and hoping that they read this far is sufficiently indirect.

² Even if I do my laundry, it will mean having to do my laundry again the next day

³ I will never not be astonished at the ability of most Chinese museum designers to make World War II boring 

⁴ Or, even better, a night in Chinese Boyfriend's bed