Starting the day with a trip to the nearest clinic, I find that even though I'm going to need to have the doctor looking down my open mouth, I can't make myself just walk into a medical facility without putting on a mask. That I'll be the only person in there (including the doctor!) to be masked is irrelevant. It's just kind of icky to be in a place where germy people congregate and potentially share their germs without at least making the basic effort to cover my mouth and nose.

Augmentin acquired and TCM refused, my next stop is a meal at the same noodle shop where I got dinner the night before because they were definitely edible and nothing else I see looks like it will be better.

This is followed by finding a shop that does tire repair¹ cause my patching skills aren't at the level where I can do it without taking the tube all the way out and I really really don't feel up to taking the rear wheel off. It's for the best anyways as the culprit turns out to be an itty bitty piece of wire that I'd never have been able to extricate from the tire if not for the industrial-grade tweezers the shop has.

Apparently deciding that the quite reasonable 5y he asked was actually overcharging me, and because it's watermelon season, I end up getting given two small watermelons along with my tire repair. One to eat now and the other one to hang out in my pannier as weight training until I successfully offload it on the owner of tonight's hotel. 

I skip the pagoda marked on Maps cause I've done too many pagodas already this Tour and going back that direction would put me in a position where I'd either have to backtrack or take the main road again. 

Hot and sunny, I'm having a hard time telling the difference between feeling like shit because of the weather, feeling like shit because I did too much the day before, and feeling like shit because I'm legitimately sick.

I'll do a reasonable job of staying on rural roads or roads with bike lanes the whole way in to Jinhua. A WeChat conversation² with the archeologist over yet another fried chicken sandwich meal at Wallace has me looking at the old downtown's architecture with a more critical eye than usual.

Chosen on account of being nearish to the train station I'll be departing from, having a washing machine, and being a reasonable place to leave my bike, my hotel is out the old downtown, through the new downtown, and into the industrial park part of the city where there's a lot of small services for people who, despite living here, don't think of it as "home".

Since the washing machine is important to me, I've called in advance³. Boss lady will be a bit surprised over my being a foreigner and she'll have to move me from my reserved apart-hotel to her older, dingier hotel proper because neither of us can figure out how to register me on the apart-hotel system⁴.

Including getting everything that needs scanning and pictating scanned and pictated, I register myself without much in the way of hiccups. The local police station will end up calling and asking her to separately take photos of me and my passport, but that's nothing unusual and, given the talent the police have for always showing up as soon as I get in the shower, is honestly preferable to them coming in person.

--

¹ Nowhere near as easy as it was 10 years ago

² In the realm of cool things I'd really like to happen and I'd really like to get involved in but I'm not holding my breath over, she's applying for a grant to do ethnographic research of rural Chinese architecture and I can be one of the people doing stuff⁵.

³ Even while advising other people to do it because it speeds things up, I mostly still refuse to call in advance regarding my being a foreigner. 

⁴ It should be noted that, although this system records the ID card and can be checked by the Public Security Bureau, it was not actually provided by the PSB the way the hotel system is.

⁵ Stuff includes both the going out and documenting things and the handing some poor grad student 15 years of my bike trip photos so they can categorize the content