The thing that gets under my skin the most about "no foreigners" at hotels is the complete inability to know—prior to showing up at the hotel—what's going to happen. I say this, not because today was one of those days where I had to argue with people, but because today wasn't.

All indicators clearly pointed to tonight being ugly. And not just a little ugly either, but super bad ugly with threats and nastiness and not getting into the room until midnight. So, of course, having dotted every 'i' and crossed every 't' and lined all my ducks up in a row to get the pain over as quickly as possible, there was no pain at all.

My most recent NAT's 72 hour validity period expired around 3am and, as I hadn't gotten one yesterday, I needed to get one today. No obvious test sites on a ride into the city where broad well-manicured and perfectly graded roads urged me into a race against myself (that then turned into a race against rain) pushed my getting swabbed into the afternoon and a gluttonous high end dimsum lunch on behalf of a fan who talks even more than I do¹ pushed that even farther into late afternoon.

Said with the full confidence of someone who has never once been rejected for any reason other than no vacancies, and who explicitly hasn't left her city since the pandemic began because "there's so many travel restrictions, it's hard to keep track of what you're supposed to do", she said there would be no problem at all at hotels. She even went so far as to prove her point that it would be ridiculous to think that a hotel in a modern Chinese city would refuse a paying customer on account of something so stupid as national origin by calling a friend of her's who manages one of the nicer places to be serving as a Quarantine Hotel.

Because my actual experience four nights this week isn't a valid indicator of how things will happen in her city when she can ask the manager of the kind of five star hotel that—if they were open right now—nearly never² turns foreigners away.

I was already a wee bit miffed that she had expected me to remember exactly which person she was that had left comments on videos I posted in 2020, but at least until I needed to be increasingly firm with "I absolutely have to go now if I want my NAT back by the time I try to check in", the massive free meal of quite expensive dimsum helped ameliorate my opinion.

By that point, I was just exasperated.

Because, other than being utterly dismissive of the possibility that negative experiences ever happen to people other than her on account of factors that aren't those people's poor choices, she wasn't unpleasant. She just wasn't acknowledging the existence anything said if it didn't fit her world view³.

At the hospital, I wandered around outside for a bit before I found a hardware store that agreed to watch my bike while I was getting swabbed. I don't think he honestly believed me that I was going to pay him but I did and I got a huge smile out of him when the Bluetooth speaker announced that he'd received 5y.

I'd chosen the more expensive single person single test tube option instead of mixed in with other people, so I only had 4 hours to kill until I was allowed in a hotel instead of 8 and I spent this time just wandering at random. The stub of city walls didn't interest me enough to come back for a better look and I was weirdly prideful in comparing the 19th century downtown and it's recent restoration work with the much better job Haikou has done to it's 19th century downtown.

I have to admit that we don't have anything like the bike trail between the river and the levee on account of not having a 20 foot tall river wall, or mountains, and being oriented in entirely the wrong direction for the oblique rays of the setting sun to light up the scene after a rain storm. We're also lacking pagodas and grandiloquent 500 year old temples. But, other than that, and a shocking lack of cafes in art deco mansions (on account of no art deco mansions), Haikou's historic area is clearly the better of the two.

Coffee beans purchased, I still had three hours to kill.

Method of getting up to the bridge deck (though not the one that apparently has a dedicated cycle lane) discovered, I still had two hours to kill.

With all that dimsum filling my stomach, even when I'd done everything I could with regards to going a block past my turn and turning around and taking wrong turns, I wasn't the slightest bit hungry when I found my hotel, with an hour still left before the NAT would be valid.

So, I got a foot massage.

Then, fully prepared for everything to go pear shaped, I sighed in resignation at the nuisance of a third floor lobby, accepted that humping my loaded bike up the stairs would probably make them a smidge less likely to reject me, steeled my shoulders, put on my mask, and had no problem whatsoever.

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¹ It seriously took a full hour from "okay, the NAT kiosk at the hospital should be open and I should go now" to my successfully disengaging.

² I've got some stories involving other people being rejected from places costing 1,000 yuan a night 

³ Things like "I've got 43,000 followers and you only private messaged me for the first time yesterday. Why would I remember who you are?"