D16: 官塘 → 中原

February 26, 2024

Honest to goodness, I do possess the ability to travel the shortest distance between two points

One of the unpleasant side effects of having had a personal assistant ever since late 2012 is that there a whole bunch of dead simple, modern type "basic life tasks¹" that I haven't really gotten around to learning, or, if I once knew how to do them, I no longer do.

An example of this would be online shopping.

In the earliest days of Chinese online shopping, before Alipay existed, when Taobao still acted as an escrow service that required the buyer to acknowledge the package as received and what they ordered in order for the seller to get paid, there wasn't yet a whole lot of stuff on Taobao that I wanted, and what little I did want it was easy enough to get a Chinese friend to handle for me.

Getting my old wristband off the watch was a bit of effort

I don't remember if the Adventures in Having a Credit Card came before or after I hired Jimmy, but I clearly remember the first time I asked him to buy something online for me, and the mansplaining² eye roll I got with the "surely that's so simple you can do it yourself" so thoroughly stuck with me that—completely separate from my never hiring a male³ assistant⁴ again—I also quite clearly remember my amusement during the nearly two hour process of watching him try to use my account to successfully complete a purchase.

I've been occasionally using Taobao on my own since late 2019, when I wanted a Santa Suit for a themed pub crawl and didn't want to explain things to my new hire. However, for anything complicated (like my spare phone) or which requires asking the seller questions, until recently chances were still pretty good that I would offload it on Tyra.

Reservoir Management Offices from 1980 with a very early and very colorful use of gravel façade

However, she's recently requested permission to take an actually full time full-time job⁵ along with a reduction in both pay and "things I can do myself⁶." Which means, on top of it officially still being non-work days, I tried on my own at changing the address on the packages that hadn't arrived yet. It's hard to say if I would have otherwise given it to her to do, but I definitely didn't give it to her, and since I did it myself, I messed up in ways I'm sure she wouldn't have.

As it is, the only reason everything is ready for pick up is because of the day spent hanging out with the Smitties.

Victorian-style Martyr's Memorial from the 1950s

I would like to think that most cities which are awarded recognition as a National Tourism City don't upscale their trophy and put it in a park.

Along the Wanquan River, the Dan Village Water Tower (built with a generous donation from an individual in 1987), the Dan Village Water Tower (built by the government in the late 90s), and the Dan Village Modern Drinking Water Pump Station (2023)

Once I go north from their place to the city, I don't really want to head for the coast. I've done that road a bazillion times and, pretty as it is, it's really way too heavily trafficked to be comfortable (especially having been in cars and seen firsthand the way drivers treat the narrow curves) riding. So, having thoroughly enjoyed what I saw of the southern banks of the Wanquan River at dusk, I decide I'm going to check out the road on the north bank.

I then plan to be staying in Yangjiang, but I'll have so much time available to me when I reach that turn-off, I eventually end up going all the way out to the town closest to the Qionghai Airport.

74 kilometers of riding to get me 15km of forward motion.

This shack doesn't look historic but the Mao sigils on the door date it to pre-1976

It's a good day. The rattle in my chest that was threatening to be becoming sick is clearing up⁷, the weather is gray and cool without actually raining, and if there aren't quite as many mansion-like houses on the north bank as there were on the south bank, this is made up for by the sheer number and concentration of old buildings.

¹ Driving a car doesn't count. I have perfectly valid reasons for being almost 43 and never having driven and they aren't all "because I live someplace bikeable with population density and mass transit."

Rural Wall Art, Surrealist Trompe L'oeil Edition

Fire Safety "anti window bar" PSA (first time for me seeing this painted on a wall)

Oddly enough, one of the murals at this Abandoned School was something I just picked up for the first time a few weeks ago in northwest Hainan

² or Hansplaining, to use a neo-neologism that specifically refers to Chinese people telling foreigners that we don't know the way things in China work for foreigners

³ there were way too many times he had problems with his boss being a woman

⁴ Jimmy (1 year), Sansa (3 years), the Useless New Girl (1 month), Princess Lazy Baby (3 weeks), Kaylee (4 years), Claire (2 months), Tyra (4 years)

Despite the signage, I don't think this "open 24 hours, free public toilet" is actually handicapped accessible

⁵ Throughout the entire time I've had an assistant, one of the constants has been my giving them all sorts of random "I don't feel like it" tasks, both of my own and of my friends, as I'm paying a 40 hour salary but only coming up with 10 to 15 hours a week of things for them to do.

⁶ Like picking up my mending from the tailor

⁷ Annoyingly, I've now got the kind of asthmatic cough where, having failed to produce anything from my lungs, my stomach tries to help out with some dry heaves and my mouth fills up with drool in ways that often lead to me choking on my own spit.

I didn't get much in the way of truly rural roads today, but what I did get was very nice

The family shrine seems to still be there in this falling down house

The quote by Zhu De is from the late 60s. No idea when the Big Character painting is from.

Today's ride: 74 km (46 miles)
Total: 988 km (614 miles)

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