fuyang trip: it's big, grainy, and slightly damp

so, i'm sitting here in fuyang feeling... well, damp? not emotionally, just literally. i just checked and it's 9.6°c right now, feels like 8.39°c, hope you like that kind of thing. humidity's 67%, which is basically 'why are my socks wet?' weather. perfect for exploring, i guess.

here's some scenery to distract from the dampness:

so this place is... massive. like, 10k square kilometers of mostly flat farmland. they've got 16.5 million mu of arable land which means it's basically one giant rice field with buildings randomly dropped in. population's 8.2 million people? that's not a city, that's a small country. someone told me the urban sprawl's gonna hit 1.19 million by 2026 - probably just more people getting lost in the grain fields.

historically it's been called ruyin, shunchang, yingzhou... basically every name except 'boring'. hometown of some ancient big shots like guanzhong (strategist), bao shuya (statesman), and ji kang (philosopher/musician). didn't run into any of them though. did find the confucius temple though - looked like any other confucius temple, which is to say 'very confucius'.

if you get bored, zhoukou and zhumadian in henan are just a short drive away. same with xinyang, bozhou, huainan. the huaihe river's to the south, but liu'an's farther across so probably not worth the trip unless you really like bridges.

transport's... fine. there's fuyang xiguan airport which sounds fancy, and buses and taxis. someone told me the airport's named after a gate - very creative. infrastructure's got sewage treatment over 45% and garbage disposal over 80%, which means about half the poop is properly processed and one-fifth of the trash isn't just... dumped somewhere. progress?


oh, and apparently this fuyang's different from a smaller one in hangzhou. who knew? like there's a whole other fuyang somewhere else. wild.


anyway, time to go stare at some rice fields. the city's got forestry coverage of 20% though - that's... trees? so there's that. hope you like slightly damp, massive grain-producing cities with historical figures.


tags: ["travel", "fuyang", "human", "vibe", "messy"]

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