I1/1 -- I1/5: 海口

February 6, 2024 to February 11, 2024

Spending the bulk of the worst of the holiday in Haikou is reminding me why I have the habit of fleeing for the holidays.

The weather—which was all kinds of lovely once I'd gotten south of the mountains that cut the island into a "north half" and a "south half"—has resumed being cold and gray up here. It will get so cold, in fact, that two of the nights I've already had to resume turning on my heat¹.

On the plus side, with the exception of the 10 minutes before and 30 minutes after midnight on New Year's Eve, the police are mostly actually enforcing the urban fireworks ban. I'll still get woken up one morning by my landlord's family setting off firecrackers in front of the building door² but it's really one one or two batches of firecrackers on one night as opposed to weeks of madness.

Walking home along the river one night, despite the police patrols³, the black powder smoke is bad enough to send me into one of those "coughing until I vomit" type asthma attacks, but, again, it's only the one time on one evening and not day after day after day of crackers and poppers and things that go boom.

That the fireworks are pointed out over the river instead of being randomly set off from inside a housing development is a Huge Mark of Progress

You can't tell from this still image but it was playing the recorded sound of firecrackers going off at War Zone volumes

Most of my friends have left the city. Many of them have left the country. Even if they were here, my reason for being here is to grind my way through the two projects my editor has sent me. The dreck isn't due until the 19th so, if I wanted to neglect it in favor of the important project⁴ I could. It's just that the content in the important project is, like, really, really, really hard.

So, I'm alternating.

I work on the important project until my brain is full, then I tap out and switch to the dreck until I start getting angry about the need to fact check everything. Originally, I'd just assumed it was poorly written, redundant, culturally insensitive, and prone to including Random Lists of Irrelevant Content⁵ (or, in other words, the kind of bog standard never-actually-brief "Brief Introduction" that are beloved by staff of every travel agency and tourism department in the country). Then, I got to parts with stuff I knew about.

Tastien has apparently decided to change their name to pinyin. I haven't checked to see if they still have duck burgers.

Indonesian style Eggs Benedict at the Happy Monk

Lacking anyone to have dumplings with on New Year's Day, I had extra large corn and pork stuffed wontons at a restaurant in Old Town

Up to this point—and with the main difference being that I am allowed to make changes as I see fit—the content prior to this point mostly just made me think back to that time I totally wasn't responsible for a major travel platform's English website being littered with off-color jokes⁶. Now, however, with dead simple things (like descriptions of the layout of a siheyuan courtyard house or the number of grottoes at the Mogao Caves⁷) being wrong, I've started picking at threads and quickly came to the conclusion that ChatGPT could have done a better, and more accurate, job of collating content intended to introduce Chinese culture.

But, hey 70,265 words down and only 31,848 (14,177 + 17,702) left to go, and then I can pick my actually intended to be toured on Tour Bike up from Feng Quan's place and begin a clockwise reset of my trip from Haikou to Haikou.

I swear both of those wear spots are new

¹ I'd rather be using the electric mattress pad that I sent back from Danzhou, but the courier station I'm supposed to go get it from is already closed.

² Which, because of a cantilever structure on the second through fourth floors, is otherwise known as "the space directly beneath my bed"

³ Of which there were many, including a car driving slowly with a loudspeaker

Light show at Haikou's historic⁸ clocktower

⁴ I am so tickled pink to be receiving files on a topic that warrants the file names starting with "非密" (This Document is Unclassified)

⁵ On the second day of the first lunar month in 2021, "Blessing China, Uniting the Two Sides of the Strait"—the Spring Prayer Ceremony for the Year of the Ox was held simultaneously at the Matsu Palace in Songshan, Xiapu County, Ningde City, Fujian Province, New Port Fengtian Palace, Chiayi, Taiwan, and Banqiao Cihui Palace, New Taipei, Taiwan. Matsu believers from both sides of the strait prayed together online.

⁶ I accept responsibility my actions as part of a team that—after we got annoyed about the end client's refusal to allow us to fix factual errors—intentionally translated things in such a way as to make bad puns, agonizing alliterations, and so so many scatological jokes. However, there was a secondary bilingual review team after mine. And it really isn't my fault that—instead of removing our obvious *wink* *wink* *nod* *nod* to colleagues that almost certainly were just as frustrated as we were—they embroidered and improved upon what we had done.

⁷ In fairness to the author, 492 is like really close to 785.

My file comments have been getting snarkier as I go on...

⁸ Terms and Conditions may apply. Although there was a clocktower in the 1890s, I feel like the hideously ugly 1960s clocktower (which was removed for road widening) was already a replacement. In any case, although it kind of looks like the original, this clocktower only dates to the late 80s.

Today's ride: 50 km (31 miles)
Total: 506 km (314 miles)

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