I dislike mansplainers.

I think all women do. At least I can't imagine a situation outside of something like a humiliation kink where a woman would enjoy being talked down to by someone who knows less than her.

The bike shop in [City Name] is, if not owned by a mansplainer, staffed by one on a day when no one else is there. 

According to him, the 5 flat tires I've had in the past 8 days are not at all because my rear tire with roughly 4,000km of usage is worn out and in need of replacing but are actually just because Jiangsu has terrible roads. While it's possible that this province might have a problem I haven't noticed with sufficient cleaning of their roads, it actually has pretty darn great roads of the excessively overbuilt variety.

I ignore him and insist on being allowed to purchase a tire.

He takes a close look at my sidewalls and tells me "we don't have your size in stock".

I ask if they have anything 26" at all and, although it isn't an exact match for either of my non-matching tires, I guess they have a tire in stock after all.

He doesn't like that I want to move my front tire to my rear and put the new tire on the front. The last place where I got a tire also didn't want to do that but the front was 4,000km younger at that time and they also did everything for me while I sat and drank beer with the owner¹.

This guy isn't doing everything for me. In fact, not only is he not doing everything, although he does take one wheel while I take another, my need to check and redo his work means he effectively isn't doing anything for me. 

As I needed him to have the front tire off before I could put it on the rear, he obviously got the front tire on faster than I got the rear. I finished seating the bead on the rear and, casually squeezing the front tire with my hand², got my battery-powered pump and confirmed that—with his great big compressor—he'd inflated it to 5psi below the minimum on the sidewall. As I pumped, he told me I inflate my tires too high. Kept at that line of telling me how wrong I am while I explained how awesome my pump is for letting me set the tire pressure and then pumping until it's right. With an automatic cutoff even.

But I'm wrong. And summer, being hot, is a time when you should run your tires a bit softer, dontcha know?

He makes a minimal concession with the second tire by getting it all the way up to the sidewall minimum.

Unlike the first tire, I'll have to watch carefully when I'm ignoring his protests and pumping it to the right pressure. Not because he has any idea what the hell he's talking about, but because the new tire has a different max pressure and although I am pretty sure I know how to change the settings, I'm not willing to risk another pointless lecture by doing it in front of him.

It's not been that long since a very large breakfast and I'm not feeling particularly hungry so, after sitting out the hottest hours of the day in his shop sipping on the last of my Vit-C drink mix, I decide I don't really need to go for lunch.

The road out of the city was just as dull and flat as the road has been my entire time in Jiangsu. Maybe a little more rural with a little more stuff to see than one of the Big Roads but still straight as an arrow and boring. I was enjoying a headwind just gentle enough to be a cooling ocean breeze instead of something to fight against when I tapped my smartwatch to check the display and realized my heart rate was way faster than it ought to be. Like 10 or 15 beats per minute faster than I was feeling.

I'm not sure if this was because I hadn't eaten lunch but finding the next possible restaurant and filling up on food and water³ got my heart rate down to where I thought it ought to be. It's probably been 10 years since I last bothered with wearing a chest strap and I have to say, I forgot how much I like having a heart rate monitor to tell me "even if you are feeling better, you haven't rested enough". 

Onwards to the village grocery store with Boyfriend's Name and the last town before the coast where I get to make the decision to night ride or not. Looking over the routes and the terrain, I'm pretty sure if I do this in the daylight, I'm going to have more trucks and no shade (possibly for hours on end) so I fill up on fluids at a milk tea shop and begin a very long Night Ride where—as I'm mostly on bridges or viaducts—it's either dead silent except for my music or it's the roar of trucks.

Nothing in between.

And then, turning towards town, it's just me on the road with maybe an occasional car every 10 minutes or so.

Outside the circle of my headlight, the only thing I can see is the blinkenlights of the forest of coastal windmills in the distance. It's actually kind of peaceful and probably one of the best bits of riding I'll do in Jiangsu.

It's not all that late when I get into town but the hotel owner waited up for me specifically on account of the name on the booking being foreign and her worrying that a foreigner showing up after the lights were out might not know to call the phone number posted on the door.

--

¹ Who I've known since 2006!

² Although people like him⁴ are certainly helping, I haven't quite deconstructed my feminine socialization to the point where I can immediately be obvious that I don't trust someone else's skills and I'm checking their work. 

³ I can't complain about being egregiously cheated on the price because, once I sat down in front of a fan, it was obvious that I was bonking hard and I only really cared about getting fluid, salt, and calories into me; and, therefore, did not ask the cost of anything I ordered until I was finished eating.

⁴ Or the people who used to fuck with my brakes when I had the Panasonic tour bike.