I'll start the morning off with one of those slightly critical videos that points out something which oughtn't have been done the way it was done and which—in being publicly discovered by a foreigner—is kind of embarrassing.

"Simon" for "West Entrance" (西门 pronounced Ximen) is a fairly common Chinglish mistake that must owe it's origin to one of the less well programmed early computer translation systems. What's odd about it, and which doesn't entirely make it into my video, is that none of the easily available automatic free translators I can find still have this error. Along with the lack of spacing between words, this means that the only way this could have happened to the shiny new bus stop outside the local Teacher's College is a colossal fuck up on the part of an actual human being.

Now it's not like the staff or student body of the university have anything to do with the creation and installation of bus stops or their signs, and I wasn't even thinking about this in terms of proximity to a school I'd never heard of. However, those textbooks I mentioned Myf hating, the ones that to this day are apparently a core part of Chinese students' curriculum, this is the school whose education department publishes them.

With the speed at which likes and comments, saves and shares initially come in, I'm actually rather surprised that this doesn't turn into something like the nationally trending 'top video' about the decorative boulder in Sanya. Also, because I've not managed to ferret out and blacklist¹ all the nationalist trolls and keyboard warriors that started targeting me after the "foreigner [not actually] behaving badly" video, this spawns a new wave of abusive messages.

Luckily, with the exception of the really gnarly bit where they're either building a new airport or massively expanding the one they have, the road from Huanggang to Huangshi is dishwater dull so the stops to get a bit of shade and clear my inbox of another 150 messages is actually pleasant.

I had assumed I was going to stay at my friend's apartment, had in fact used my friend's apartment as the address for a coffee resupply and the Shaanxi Hillriders International Team (SHIT) jersey Marcus promised me. However, because Chinese people are weird³ like that, he tells me to meet him at a different downtown location where he's already paid for two nights at an AirBnb equivalent.

Every single piece of clothing but the off-bike wear in the washing machine then hung up to dry, when we go out for hotpot dinner at Haidilao⁴ followed by a super lush foot spa, the other reasons for visiting him don't have me nearly quite so happy as the prospect of all my clothing being clean followed by a whole day spent indoors. 

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¹ It's not as obvious as it should be as too many of my actual fans think it's hilarious to use similar verbiage and accuse me of being a spy who is secretly mapping China² for the purposes of selling this information to the BBC. 

² When a comment about my inspecting infrastructure as potential military targets comes up on a late Ming dynasty stone bridge, it's obviously a fan taking the piss. The exact same comment on a "I just crossed this Yangtze River bridge", however, is probably someone I'll be needing to blacklist.

³ All people are weird. All cultures, when viewed through an external lens are weird.

⁴ A famous nationwide brand that, this being my first ever visit, didn't super impress me even before the 3am explosive diarrhea.