Chapter 195

Distance covered: 250 km (total 3450 km)

Up fairly early, I stretched a bit and then we packed and went to meet our friends a few blocks down. We dropped the dog at a pet store for a haircut, which also allowed us to not worry about shurgwaydingers at the restaurant where we went for lunch. So far pretty much every meal on this trip, and since I moved to China in fact, has been excellent and making the hipster foodie in me slowly nod in agreement, but I’m afraid this one did not. The oat noodles looked good but were slattered in a mushroom gravy, the crab legs were sickly salty and annoying to eat, the pigeon legs were kinda like chicken but with 20% the moisture, and the typical Hebei rolled pancakes were also so dry it felt like eating wrapping paper. It wasn’t a bad meal like, say, every meal I had in the Philippines, or bad like that piece-of-shit Philadelphia cheesesteak sandwich; it was still prepared with effort and with an attention to presentation and service on par with elsewhere in China, just not to my taste. I ate the clams gleefully, my favorite thing on the table, drank my beer, and smiled and nodded when asked how it is. I said I had to go to the toilet and tried to sneak in to the front counter to pay but the architect saw through my ruse and didn’t let me, insisting to treat us.

We picked up the dog, now all clean cut, said our goodbyes and got on the road. The girlfriend was behind the wheel, she initially lamented about how rusty she was after a month not driving but a few small clumsy blunders aside (that paled in comparison to the fucktarded moves that cars around us were doing) she got back in the groove quickly and we headed north. Soon we were in Shanxi province, one of the only two I hadn’t set foot in yet. And I sat there wondering, what the hell had I been waiting for?! We entered mountain territory, with steep rock peaks of all shapes, it really changed from the flat area I’d been in since leaving Jinan. I love mountains, so I was looking forward to exploring this region.

The highway mostly took a direct route, which involved tunnels several kilometers long, the longest we crossed was over 8000 m! That’s a seriously incredible feat of engineering. The girlfriend was in charge and zeroed in on some Buddhist temple in the region, so the GPS got us off the highway and we kept going for 50 km or so on pleasantly winding country roads. We stopped in a town with the amusing name of Doucun (“Bean Village”), a short distance from the temple, that we’ll keep for tomorrow. I went to enquire in an inn, half-expecting to be turned away for being a filthy foreigner, but the lady didn’t even raise an eyebrow. And when I asked if the dog can also stay there she paused and looked at me as if I asked if it’s allowed to breathe oxygen, before saying “...yeah”. Gotta love those no-nonsense honest rural folks. The room didn’t have AC but had a powerful fan, and she said it gets cool at night, something we were already feeling.

There were middle-aged women peeling garlic in the courtyard. One of them asked something that sounded like “Grumble grumble grumble” and I replied “What? Do you speak standard Mandarin Chinese?”, the innkeeper translated from mountain redneck language and said “She’s asking when’s the last time you’ve been out of China”. That’s a question I never really got until a few months ago, but now it’s happening all the time, after all this xenophobic propaganda about foreigners bringing back the virus to a now pandemic-free China. I reassured her.

First order of business, crack open a Russian beer from the cooler, and then, we emptied the car completely in the parking lot. Doing so, we could clean up the sand and garbage and dead insects, but also rearrange all of our gear now that we also have the girlfriend’s bags to carry and that the front passenger seat is not a storage space anymore. Just her makeup bag was taking up significant space that had to be cleared.

We took a walk in the small town, until we reached the end, a superb view of mountains over corn fields. Well she walked with the dog, I rode my longboard, might as well use it now that I decided to bring it along. We sat watching the sunset through the clouds, and then looked for a place to eat dinner. One restaurant was too damn hot, one was too crowded, so we went to one that advertized “Hangzhou-style xiaolongbao” or a totally inauthentic but tasty and heavy northern version of the small soupy dumplings. I got something from the fridge I initially thought was a beer but turned out to be juice made from a local berry, and it was pretty damn refreshing. A great day. I hope your day was great too.