I spend pretty much the entire day if not on the National Road then on a truck route. As a result, this day ought to be a miserable one. However, from unique and unusual wall paintings¹ and murals² to anatomically incorrect Qilin³ in both male and female⁴ at one of the petrol stations (where I stop for a toilet break, to stick my head under the sink for a while, and to refill my bidon), it's a surprisingly full day.

Among other notable activities, a friend of mine accepts 3,000y from my WeChat Wallet to pay my landlord⁵ for me, the damn reorganized client pays me the four months⁶ of delayed wages, I spend a midday hour in a Wallace Fried Chicken working on a translation for the 2022 China Seed Congress and Nanfan⁷ Agricultural Silicon Valley Forum, and I get another 100,000 view TikTok with a sign that ought to say "Waste Discarding Prohibited" which instead says "West".

Nearing the end of the day, just past the Rest Area with the best statues ever⁸, I'll buy some of the worst homemade grape wine⁹ I've ever encountered¹⁰ before calling it a day in a town that makes next to no impression on me.

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¹ Propaganda and Public Service Announcements being increasingly done as mass produced colored canvas advertising banners affixed to the wall, and painted on stuff often being copies of Model Drawings, it's refreshing to run across something different.

² Artistic 'totally not propaganda' is a relatively New Thing for the beautification of some rural locations. My personal favorite is surrealist Trompe L'oeil. Common themes like traditional landscape paintings often suffer from the attempt to make them building sized and visible from a passing car.

³ Forgetting for a moment that it's a mythical creature, it's a cold blooded mythical creature, it ought to have a cloaca.

⁴ Second clearly female statue of the trip.

⁵ Separate from my being a month late because of the damn reorganized client that hasn't paid me, WeChat has decided that since I've never sent large sums of money to this person via WeChat, I am not allowed to send money to him at all as he must be a scammer.

⁶ There's actually seven but I didn't see any point in continuing to issue bills

⁷ Referring to an agtech practice where northern crops are planted in the tropics so that new varietals can be force bred quicker, "Nanfan" is the pinyin of the abbreviation for southern seed propagation and breeding. It is also my least favorite word.

⁸ Rest Areas are set up and maintained by the same department that builds and maintains roads. In this case, unlike more traditional statues such as Unidentifiable Pointy Things Which Are Supposed to Have Meaning, soldiers, questionable animals, or totally not homoerotic socialist men who are Building the Country, it's a three piece diorama of somewhat dweeby looking road surveyors. There's even a pair of guys sitting at a table doing paperwork!

⁹ Back in 2015, Myf made me watch a documentary (possibly called "Seeing Red") on the development of the wine industry in China and how pretentious Chinese of all economic levels not only like to buy red wine (which they may or may not mix with Sprite) but also how vineyards were starting to become a thing despite a distinct lack of knowledge in terms of grape cultivars, grape cultivation, or how to make good wine.

¹⁰ I dabble at brewing on occasion and have personally made some really bad alcohol. This was horrific. As in, "I poured it down the sink the next morning". Rather than cutting the sweetness, adding water to it only accentuated the vinegar.