T6: 海口 → 福山

February 13, 2025

The heel has developed a hole, so this is the final time for these socks that I picked up in Ireland when Lufthansa lost my luggage

About two months ago, one of the tandian videos I did was for free eyelash extensions. I am not an eyelash extension kind of girl. Not by a long shot.

However, I actually found the process of having individual "natural look" fake lashes glued one at a time to my existing lashes to be quite meditative, and—similar to the way looking at yourself with photo/video filters (or after weight loss) has you normalizing your current appearance—although I couldn't tell that anything had been done, I liked it.

It's been long enough that there's no chance I still have those lashes, but, because I chose a "natural look" as opposed to one of the more extreme versions, it's never been obvious that my extensions want touching up. I mention all of this because the lash place I went to was near the train station and it had been my intention to go on my way back to Fushan and my bicycle.

Who thought shit brown coffee beans was a good idea for bus stop benches?

However, because Fushan is a less important train station on the less important side of the island, less trains run that way than if I were going to Sanya (or even Wenchang), and it's get the train I get or wait three more hours.

So, whether natural-look or extreme (Sarah really wanted me to go with extreme), as my willingness to femme things up a bit extends only as far as going back to the specific place I went last time, my lashes have remained undone for now.

Arriving in Fushan, Firewhot's sister-in-law and mother-in-law have temporarily gone to the family's place in Wuzhishan leaving her and the baby at the Ethiopian Coffee Experience Center. I don't know enough Ethiopian people to be able to tell if the very sincere invitation from her Chinese husband that I should come stay at their place tonight is something she agrees with or if it's merely something she's going along with.

It's been a long, looooong time since I've been someplace that the Traffic Police still allowed these

I suspect a taxi via Didi would have cost the same but this was more fun

Whatever the case may be, nice car, a desirable shop front, and talking about the family owning property doesn't necessarily translate into a comfortable place to live. Possibly, this is because of a Chinese tendency to treat the temporary place you stay at when working as little more than a dormitory where you store your body when you're not using it¹, but—as customers tend not to see where you sleep—it could also be a "face" thing.

I don't know. I know that I've been apartment hunting recently and I know that they can't be saving all that much per month² by renting this instead of an apartment in the fancy tower blocks that are part of the Coffee Culture Town development.

Daughter explaining to Dad what I need him to do in a video I'm making reenacting my check in

In any case, the beds currently vacated by the relatives who aren't here are all the extra hard "I'm a white collar worker who has never labored with my muscles and I don't understand why people want soft mattresses" type. The people who are tiring themselves out uniformly never want to go back to hard beds after having a comfortable night's sleep. It's the middle class³ that honest to goodness ask me if I minded the "overly soft" bed at the hotel which was organized as part of a business trip.

I've got a fair degree of hard bed that I'm willing to take. Most of the time—so long as it's not a Trelane, Squire of Gothos-type imitation of a real mattress⁴—although I'd prefer springs, I can 'just whatever' my way through the night.

But, I really don't want to when I don't have to. And going to a hotel means both going to sleep and waking up when I want to.

So, I kind of insist that appreciation of the offer notwithstanding, I'm going to go find somewhere else to stay. It's not all the way in to town at the cyclist-owned place I know and like, but it's only three kilometers down the road, and costs only slightly more than I'm likely to spend on a single cocktail.

¹ Given the condition which I have allowed the apartment I'm about to move out of to gradually get into over the past decade says that this is not just a Chinese thing

² We're talking the equivalent of one or two restaurant meals at the kinds of restaurants they seem to regularly be eating at.

³ My first ever experience with a memory foam mattress in a Chinese hotel was a trucker motel with a room barely bigger than the bed.

⁴ I am actively offended by the hard mattresses that are designed to look like real mattresses

Today's ride: 15 km (9 miles)
Total: 1,660 km (1,031 miles)

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