Up early, I'm still luxuriating over the good coffee from that café in Huaqing and a big, moist brownie from the American Bakery when my liaison contacts me. Neither of the two notices (one for students returning to campuses on the mainland, one on the implementation of normalized prevention and control measures¹) is urgent but both of them should go out before noon, if possible. Also, unlike the majority of things coming out of the usual offices, hardly any of the TUs² match³.

As a result, the combined 3,900 characters takes me through the end of my brownie, into the cinnamon roll, and out past the making of another round of coffee. 

My first destination of the day is the Diaolou of the Lake - a tower sticking up from a local reservoir perhaps 25km south of where I am right now. By this point, even if I still (after four visits to Kaiping) haven't been to any of the diaolou clusters that are expressly a UNESCO recognized tourism site, I'm starting to get sufficiently overwhelmed by them that I don't even bother to go off the main road into most villages to so much as get a closer look.

The lake diaolou would have been a bit better without the "drinking water reservoir, keep out" chain link fence blocking the pretty views, and better still if it had sailboats or kayaks (and friends to go boating with) but it has none of these things so it's back out to the through road and continuing south towards the coast.

Along my way I'll stop at a big brick walled community center from the 1950s, try to talk with a granny who eventually admits that she can't speak Mandarin, fail to visit some Amazing and Awesome Historic Village on account of worries about the weather, and get caught out in a wisp of approaching typhoon that's bad enough for me to walk my bike to the next available shelter and hide there with a girl on a scooter who is also dubious about her ability to make it elsewhere tonight.

Contemplating the possibility of seeing if one of the lived-in village houses will take us in, I try calling my hotel to see if there's any chance of paying them to arrange a van to come pick me up. Unlikely, I'm told, but we can try; and they say they'll call me back or search my number and add my WeChat. Then, when the rains have let up, even though I have no missed calls, I race to the hotel ahead of the next deluge and the Front Desk is all "why didn't you respond when we called you back?"

I don't think they actually attempted to get me a van and I don't think they actually tried to call me back. But, the NAT I did yesterday afternoon is already 26 hours old, local policy for this county is officially requiring "less than 24", and my drowned-rat-self is being checked in, so I choose not to fuss.

Up to the room, I change into dry clothing and go out for dinner and tomorrow's groceries.

---

¹ Meaning one NAT every 72 hours if you want to enter any public venue or use transit

² "Translation Unit" which, in this case, is defined as punctuation mark to punctuation mark

³ My copy of Trados is set to auto-propagate down to a 70% match.Yesterday (from when I'm writing this) I gave them a discount on a 3000 word document where 44% of the TUs were a 100% match with notices I had previously translated.