day 29: 鹿泉 (luquan) - 井陉 (jingxing) = 23,5km

I woke up and went down the hallway to brush my teeth:

Then I put on my backpack and started walking on that long winding road.

- I didn’t know yet about the suffering I would see today. -

For everything, there’s a first. Here’s my first prison in China:

This is one where they make people work in the labor force. I didn’t dare to go near, but someone told me that the inmates have to break their backs doing this:

Mud. As you can imagine, digging up mud in a penitentiary isn’t very pleasing and doesn’t pay very well. In Chinese this would be called “吃苦” - to eat bitter.

The thing is, it’s not only the inmates who are obviously having some pretty rough days.

It’s worse: The very soil that they live on, the ground that I was walking on today, it is suffering. In fact it sometimes looks like an open wound itself:

Remember: THIS is what the glitzer-towns of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are built upon.

Layer after layer the earth gets taken away.

It’s virtually Nature’s last stance in some places.

…and the water:

It reminded me in a way of Yellowstone’s volcanic springs.

How cynical!

After all this, I needed a break - and I found the perfect place for it:

Not a bit of suffering up here.

Listening to the vehicles rushing by on the highway below, I was having crackers and a yogurt drink - when something came up soaring from below and BLASTED just a few meters from me, almost shattering my eardrums and thus ruining my lunch break.

Another f… wedding ceremony, I thought.

Someone has told me that I am often wrong:

It was a funeral.

I didn’t want to bother these poor grieving souls, so I stayed in the distance, didn’t shoot much and just kind of looked at what was going on.

Suffering and sadness can be very beautiful things.

…

Well, enough of that - show you something funny to round it up for today:

Would you go eat here?

Everybody knows the Chinese eat dogs. It’s true. And every Chinese person is going to tell you that they don’t eat as many dogs as you would think. And that they only eat a special breed of dog, a kind of meat-dog, not your average pet dog around the corner! That is also true.

Now I am thinking: Who for God’s sake came up with the idea for the design with the sad puppy in the pot? I mean, COME ON…

Oh, and I assured that my hotel room would have some adequate heating today:

See the two massive towers that look like they belong to a power plant or something? Well, my hotel is right in front of them. And my room is in the basement, underground, where the heat is. I’ll have a warm night I guess.

To the poor souls hurting today, to Nature bleeding away: I wish them peace.

Soundtrack: Tiamat - “Gaia”

—total: 404,3km