D30: 石井→厦门

November 8, 2019

In 2014, Peter was here; In 2019, Marian was here too

There is very little of interest that happens today. This is often the case when one is approaching a large city. As is their nature, large cities tend to have interesting things inside them. If they didn't, people wouldn't want so much to live in them. (Even if the only thing large cities had going for them were jobs that paid a good wage, the fact that people spend time existing outside of work means that the critical mass of people living in the city would soon enough create interesting things.)

For some reason however, there is very little that can be described as "interesting" on the periphery of a large city. I don't know enough about social anthropology to know whether or not there is any truth in it, but I have a theory that this is because people on the outskirts of large cities have the ability to easily and conveniently go into the city. Therefore, they never create much in the way of "interesting things" in their immediate vicinity.

In any case, today was pretty dull.

Main gate of a satellite campus of Xiamen University

少生优生幸福一生 Few Births, Excellent Upbringing, Good Fortune is a Single Child

I was highly amused that this otherwise empty shrine (it's one of those ones where, lacking an idol to represent the god in question, they have a piece of paper with its name written on it) has an address

The modern equivalent of a Big Character Slogan exhorting you to use China Telecom broadband riffs on the propaganda slogan "if you want fortune to come, first fix the roads"

I'm not entirely sure what year 丙申年 is in the 60 year cyclical calendar but it's something modern. I was amused that they decided to use this instead of a numerical year to represent the date that this Welcome Rock was put up.

I started off on a large straight road before moving onto a larger straighter road. At least some of the time I had bike lanes to use but the combination of the efforts made to keep other vehicles off the bike lanes and the GPS's refusal to notice that I was 'technically' on the road (even though I was actually about 15 feet off of it going in not quite straight lines through a lovely strip of green park) and, therefore, to keep squawking at me that it had recalculated, and that I needed to head in thus and such direction for 5 meters and turn right (onto the road I was already on) was pretty annoying.

As I got closer to the city though, the roads just got bigger and straighter and faster. There were a few times where, blindly trusting in the GPS's ability to send me back the right way, I went off looking for something that seemed potentially interesting from a distance and, of those, the things mostly turned out to actually be kind of interesting; but, mostly, it was just big and straight and traffic and speed bumps.

At least until I got into Xiamen proper.

I've been seeing just as many Amitabha stones as in previous years but they've not been especially interesting examples of them. Except for this one which has some other prayer written on it.

I liked the juxtaposition of the granite window bars on the one window and the brick ones for the other window. No window glass of course on an old house like this one. The red painted propaganda is Maoist (so pre 1976), the white one in the upper right is One Child Policy.

"Drive carefully so your Mom doesn't worry so much"

Then it was traffic and speed bumps and road works and subway construction and large trucks.

I had not originally intended to go all the way in to Xiamen but, other than being well overdue for the oil change that Shimano recommends after the first 1000km of use, I'm really not liking the way my hub gears are behaving with the lone gear that mostly won't engage at all and the persistent habit of the granny equivalent to insist on shifting into second and Xiamen's the largest city I'm going to see for a while so I figure a visit to a Xiamen bike shop is in order.

I pick the one I go to on the basis of online reviews and they are, in fact, just as nice as the reviews say. They are also unwilling to even consider messing around with an 11 speed planetary hub because, directions or no, they ain't never seen nothing like that and the thought of fucking it up scares them too bad.

I haven't been checking so it's hard to say when I broke a spoke though the broken spoke, spoke nipple, and nub still being present makes it very likely that one of the many speed bumps I th-bumped over on my way through the city's mess was probably the culprit. They don't have any spokes quite the right length but manage to frankenstein something together for me, and, as part of the "not messing with a gear hub" fear, go to great lengths to get it in without taking the wheel off.

Pedestrian underpass to one of the big roads

Empty tunnel beneath the road with evidence of modern spraypaint graffiti that's been cleaned away

A weird sort of shrine in the roadside greenspace when I was lost

Crossing the first of many bridges into Xiamen

Certain that I'm going to get hit with an NFA (no foreigners allowed) I spend a lot of time deliberating over where to attempt to go only for the first place I walk in (second place I check out) to have regularly had foreigners in the past and to have the kind of magic scanner that Peter wrote about that OCRs the information off the passport and into the registration form. It still needs some babying though as first the OCR isn't the greatest and second he's never had anyone on an honest-to-goodness residence permit.

I last entered the country on August 1st. That was more than 90 days ago. Haven't I overstayed? Why isn't the number of days per entry written anywhere on my visa?? Ahhhhhhh.....

I don't think I've ever seen someone over the age of 4 work themselves into a frenzy that fast nor realize that there is, in fact, no disaster and calm down again in such a decidedly short timespan.

It's a little hard to make out because of the elevated subway construction going on behind it, but Xiamen's mass transit system predates the subway craze with dedicated busways

Big pieces of granite being taken somewhere

Getting around in this traffic was kind of hairy

I liked all the different kinds and colors of shiny glass windows

The painfully expensive room which I get overlooks what might be described as a piazza in Spain but is more of a giant alley courtyard full of nightlife that promises to be loud and annoying until I close the double paned windows and everything goes impressively silent.

...

As of this writing, I've made 72 sales on my RedBubble shop for an average return of nearly $0.25 an hour that I've put into going over my holiday photos and learning to be better at graphic editing programs. If you'd like to help buy me a cup of coffee, contribute to my tours and my ability to write about tours, or just buy some cool weird stuff, the One Child Policy propaganda piece above is available for sale on everything from socks to stickers.

Today's ride: 66 km (41 miles)
Total: 1,864 km (1,158 miles)

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