"You're a whiner," screamed Lynne the Explorer. A whiner! All I said was I need windscreen wipers on my glasses. We were riding our pushbikes by the lake, and the rains came. Lynne had already scouted out this whole area, somehow finding time between classes and sleeping. She'd biked along the highway, up to canals, turned back, gone through townships, shouted ni hao at the locals, hit another dead end... Now she was taking me there. She's a fearless explorer, with the spirit of a true adventurer. "We met the president of Honduras, we did," she told me. "He was just getting off the plane and we were there. Oh we took a photo with him, sure."
Lynne is from Minnesota, with a voice I recognise from Fargo. It's relentlessly friendly, and loud too. The locals light up on hearing her admittedly terrible Chinese. We biked into this small town, with one high street. I had my eye out for coffee but there wasn't a lot on offer. We followed the canals and strolled past tiny houses, cute bridges, barges made of, ahem, concrete, and plenty of intrigued Chinese faces. Lynne stopped to get all luvvie with the Chinese baby and her mum. No one spoke a word of English.
At her last job in China, in Shaanxi province, Lynne moved out of the apartment block where the teachers lived and settled down in a cave with the locals. A cave is called a yaodong, and about 40 million people live in such things, would you believe it. 40 million and one, once Lynne heard about it. She still wants to kit out her new apartment in authentic stuff like the locals have, and down by the canal I found myself attempting to mediate a conversation in Chinese, with Lynne trying to ask where a wooden pot, like the one owned by the woman, could be bought. We never worked out the answer, and went away wondering if that pot was in fact a toilet.
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