If I thought that yesterday's bits of truck route were unpleasant, I had no idea what I was in for today. Luckily, having told Boyfriend that I might be able to make it to his place by very late tonight if he doesn't mind my arriving in a condition fit to do nothing but shower and collapse, he has appropriately read my mind¹ and offered to come and get me.

As he rightfully doesn't think my bike will fit in his daily driver² and he needed to go pick up the RV from the shop an hour north of him anyways, I'll still have some bike riding to do before we meet rather substantially closer to where I started from than where he started from.

Featuring narrow shoulders and the kind of clumps of traffic caused by a slower-moving vehicle that a bunch of people have been unable to pass, the only thing that keeps me on this road instead of haring off to something twice as long and three times as complicated is the knowledge that he's coming to get me and I really shouldn't make it any harder than necessary³.

Stopping for a cold drink and an updated location pin around noon, he calls me to say I should find a place for lunch as he's still got nearly an hour before he'll reach me. Although I will skip past twenty or thirty restaurants for looking too shabby or too empty of customers at lunchtime on a truck route, his arrival at my “perfect spot” makes it very obvious that we have rather different ideas of what constitutes a perfect spot for lunch⁴.

Whereas I saw a place where every potential parking spot was full as an indicator that the food would probably be tasty, he only saw poverty and dirt⁵.

So, packing up my just-arrived-at-the-table dumplings and paying for them and my weird off-brand soda⁶, I get what is possibly the only 'in public' hug⁷ to take place during the visit and we decamp to someplace where tables and chairs (that match!) were purchased this decade and attempts have been made at décor. 

With a single appetizer dish of cold peanuts costing more than my big plate of meat-stuffed dumplings and the whole meal⁸ running north of what I am wont to spend on multiple meals and a night's hotel, I'm tickled pink by my re-plated dumplings being the only dish we finish and us both agreeing that they taste better than everything else.

But, he's even more posh up north than he is down south and while bare concrete floors might be acceptable when he's deep in the countryside on a bicycle or a motorcycle, it's far, far too crude for this version of him.

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¹ Differences in culture, upbringing, and background mean that most of his mind-reading tends towards giving me things girls are supposed to want rather than what I actually want.

² Since it's not the car he drives when he's in Hainan, I don't yet know that it's an Audi. Still, I do know that he's the kind of person with Very Strong Feelings about subjects like caked-on mud or trunks held shut by bungee cords, and I wouldn't dream of even suggesting we attempt transporting a bike of mine on a car of his that doesn't have a bike rack.

³ In retrospect, and considering both the location of expressways and the speed which one moves on an expressway, it probably would have been easier if I'd just never left my hotel in the morning.

⁴ Boyfriend's place in Hainan has a unique-for-China food culture that involves a lot more dinner parties in people's homes and a lot fewer restaurants that so much as begin to approach guest-worthiness. As a result, although I'd known he has the Chinese habit of ordering far too damn much food, I didn't realize that Road Me's Standards for "this looks nice" was quite that far below Urban Him's Standards of "minimum feasibility for consideration".

⁵ They did have a hand-washing basin (with soap!) outside the front door, which puts them well ahead of many supposedly nice places

⁶ One of those drinks where an artificial sweetener† was added to make up for them cheaping out on the sugar as opposed to one where it's a zero calorie alternative to the sugar.

† For some reason, the sugar + sweetener products almost all use aspartame but the sweetener instead of sugar products use any of a wide variety of chemicals.

⁷ While I am more than a bit put out by the constant rebuffing of what I consider to be perfectly normal, absolutely low-key public displays of affection, it comes alongside him pointing out to me that the only people we see holding hands while downtown are parents keeping track of small children rather than couples 

⁸ Including a fish that we both pick at and which he—from the point of view of someone who does a lot of cooking—declares to have been inexpertly killed and improperly handled.