I2/2: 海口

February 24, 2024

Despite the prevalence of fuzzy rabbit ears being worn this year, it is not the Year of the Rabbit

Today was an absolutely perfect day for not riding. Not only had I made plans to do something in the evening with a friend and come back to the city specifically so I could do the thing, but it was also raining! On top of that, the rattle in my chest that's been intermittently showing up as I'm surfacing into morning consciousness has decided that it's definitely an infection and, although I'll be an idiot and forget to bring my insurance card with me, I still get to be seen at a clinic that's familiar to and with me.

Antibiotics, analgesics, and decongestant. Not even 80y.

Pick up the two packages that weren't rerouted to Qionghai, get most of the pile of laundry that I left on my living room floor last week done and dried, and then I'm off to buy a small bouquet of flowers in preparation for Flower Exchanging Festival in Fucheng.

I've never actually found out if my neighborhood clinic charges to see the doctor or if they only charge for prescriptions.

Absurd amount of packaging, but for the next 10 days I've got salt preserved hard boiled duck eggs to go in my oatmeal

Held on the 15th day of the first month of the Lunar New Year for the past eight or nine hundred years, Flower Exchanging Festival is a local version of Lantern Festival that heavily incorporates all the stuff the mainland celebrations of the holiday do along with tried and true aspects of "street festivals around the world," and the giving and getting of flowers.

Weirdly enough, since this is the only time I've gone where I prepared flowers in advance, it took quite a while before either Sarah or I got any, and then only after we started giving our's away. Lacking any dreamy guys who were really catching my attention, I gave all of mine to first aid staff and traffic police.

We were not the first people to have had this idea

Sarah giving the TV station a reenactment of her giving a flower to a police officer

The first part of the festival was kind of a bit shite. With a light rain literally damping down the crowds, the direction we came in from not only didn't have the great lanterns that I usually expect to be in the alleys, there was also an inexplicably loud recording playing from every fucking speaker in the neighborhood reminding people not to get blotto drunk in public during the festival and that all ebikes that hadn't been moved off the designated streets by 2pm would be moved without the owners' input.

After a brief interlude literally spent "chasing a dragon¹" that we heard from two alleys over, however, we came out onto a major street that had something approaching the kind of crowds I'm used to from the previous times I've gone.

Possibly the reason the fancy lanterns weren't in the alleys was cause someone decided to put them all in the park this year

I've been at least three other years and this alley is usually jammed with people as they slowly look up at the nice lanterns

As the last time I went was in 2022 and it was the usual exhilaratingly scary mass of people as from when I went in 2012 and 2016, I can't even blame Covid or the economy for there not being as many people as on a non drizzly year.

Although I didn't get any photos of them, recent trends in Hanfu-wearing were on display to the extent that I even saw a young man who clearly wasn't a performer wearing white robes and carrying a waxed paper umbrella. However, most Hanfu wearers and all the people I saw in Loli were young women between the ages of 15 and 25.

Sometimes the best way to see what's going on is too check out other people's phone screens as they hold them up over the crowd

Sarah has to work tomorrow and I'm back to the bike trip so it ended up being an early night and, as I wasn't up for staying around a street festival on my own so once she got herself a taxi, I coddled my tendencies to get carsick², found a sharebike, and rode home.

¹ Something which both of us were aware is a metaphor for addiction, most usually heroin addiction, and which we couldn't stop laughing about the whole time we were chasing the dragon

² The less I'm in cars, the worse it is; the worse it is, the less I want to be in cars.

Today's ride: 13 km (8 miles)
Total: 911 km (566 miles)

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