Portrait of an LBX

By Andy

One thing this trip has done for us is clarified the difference between villages (村), townships (乡), towns (镇), county seats (县城) and cities (市), which are all various administrative levels of government. Well, I still can’t tell you how the politics of it work or what sort of population a place has to have before it gets bumped up to the next administrative level, but I can tell you what sort of amenities can and cannot be found at each level and what the chances are of being hassled by the cops (on a scale of 1-5), assuming you’re a non-Asian foreigner: (more…)

We left our hotel extremely late yesterday, around one in the afternoon, after a morning of trying to get stuff onto the website through the horribly slow Internet. I spent some additional time getting all the grit from the rainstorm out of my chain and other moving parts and re-oiling things again. I think my parents would be proud to know that I finally value something mechanical enough and understand how it works sufficiently to keep it maintained. At least I hope so. Reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in May certainly made me appreciate the process more as well. There is no doubt a certain satisfaction to be derived from doing something oneself, especially when doing it right. And when you start to know how to do it correctly, it becomes harder and harder to let anyone else do it for you because there’s no guarantee they’ll do it right, and they certainly have no skin in the game. At some point, I’d like to discuss some of my observations in China in the context of “Zen,” but this post is going to be long enough without it.

In my last entry we were debating whether to head south toward Rizhao or west toward Taishan and Henan. After looking at our map and seeing how far south Rizhao would take us and how silly it would be to work our way back up to Henan from there, only to head south again, we decided to head west. We began by moving southwest on the provincial road running through Ducun, S217. After missing our turn-off, we decided to take the next paved road west that we saw. The road took us through a small village, after which the pavement disappeared and we were on a dirt road through the countryside. With the exception of the ever-present dust and perfectly planted rows of trees, as we moved through rolling hills covered with corn I could imagine that I was back home in southern Pennsylvania. As we began climbing uphill, the dirt road eventually ran into another paved road, and we flew downhill at 45km per hour. From there we wound through narrow, back-country roads for what was the most pleasant ride of our trip thus far. We passed through several tiny villages where corn once again lay drying on at least half of the road. The words coming out of the mouths of the elderly residents meandering the streets were about as intelligible to us as the mooing of the cows tied outside some of the houses or the clucking of chickens from inside the courtyard homes.

As we passed through one of the villages by the name of Chujiawangwu (褚家王吴村), a man in his late 30s or early 40s waved us down and invited us into his home to eat. After stashing our bikes in his courtyard, we sat down in his living room where we chatted, and his wife served us bowls of noodles and sausage, which everyone ate out of courtesy despite Jewish, vegetarian and anti-sausage requirements. (more…)