D51: 崆峒

June 5, 2021

I'm now getting quite the collection of these seven

I already wrote this entry once before but the internet ate it while it was saving and, just now, when I tried to connect to this site without a VPN on, I couldn't. However, when I switched phones (and ISPs), absolutely no problem at all.

I had a mostly lovely day with Mr. Xie. I just wish that he'd told me before we went out that there was going to be quite so much climbing and walking and standing as I would have then prepped with a regular strength prescription painkiller¹. However, despite his telling people all about the "I have an invisible handicap" video that I posted a few days ago, he clearly had not actually internalized that someone who is capable of biking across a continent might have problems with walking.

If, at around 3:30 in the afternoon, he hadn't had what was either a rude boss demanding weekend work or a polite excuse because I'm boring, there's a reasonable chance that the day would have ended in narcotics.

We started the day with a shockingly expensive breakfast that—like last night's dinner and the fruit teas at his friend's place—I wasn't allowed to pay for before hiking across the construction site in progress of a wetlands park to be up to a Daoist Temple where the oldest inscription stone about "so and so donating money for this and that shrine to be rebuilt" which we could find was solidly 19th century.

Initially, I had tentatively dated this series of murals to the late 19th century but there were some exceedingly similar signed works from the 1980s in another shrine

Far and away from being the most inexpertly done murals in the temple, this lady was photographed because I was astonished to be seeing Phra Mae Thorani in China

After what I'm sure was far more comparative art analysis than he thought possible² coming from someone who only has a passing acquaintance with the actual subject matter, we moved on the new county museum where I got to be simultaneously impressed with the content of the exhibits and annoyed with the lack of explanation. I realize I'm badly spoiled by growing up in the vicinity of the Smithsonian Institutions but I really don't understand what's the deal with having large swathes of empty space in which you don't tell the visitor the cultural significance of what they're looking at.

This was followed by a profoundly disappointing free lecture by a museum docent who admittedly managed to impart some new knowledge upon me, it's just that she managed to impart less new knowledge upon me than Mr. Xie had just by being a casually interested person who had happened to know what some of the things we were looking at were.

Mostly made of plaster, her damaged neck and body are a combination of straw and wooden slats

Before this idol was enshrined, the one in the previous photo would have been the central figure for this shrine

By this point I was limping so, whether or not it was actually work, I was quite glad that he needed to go as I needed a good two hour lie down before I could even think about going grocery shopping.

¹ By which I mean the type that you can't get high from taking too much of but you can go into organ failure from

² The temple was a fascinating mix of styles ranging from illustrated by someone's developmentally delayed nephew on up to real art signed by artists

A Tibetan Buddhist figure that is unique in that the eyes are open and looking forwards instead of cast downwards w

Today's ride: 5 km (3 miles)
Total: 1,898 km (1,179 miles)

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