Just because I said I was going to do my best to make sure that I don't get into any altercations with local police this trip doesn't mean that I will in any way, shape, or form, cease to provide support to another foreigner who, having been NFA'd, wants to raise a fuss.

Sabina flew to Ningbo this morning to visit friends before leaving China for an Australian 'working holiday visa'. Obviously she doesn't have a huge amount of funds available to just waste on hotel rooms so she decided to book a bed at an international youth hostel. She picked a place on the basis of it being relatively close to mass transit and to where her various friends live. On the booking website, the mixed gender dorms were all listed as being limited to Mainland Guests only "限内宾".

After many multiple episodes of paid for reservations—including, on one occasion, reservations for 40 rooms—not actually translating into getting a room at the hotel where the reservation was made, I generally don't believe much in the concept of "advanced reservations". However, I do—very occasionally—book rooms in advance. 

At some time in the past four or five years, I started noticing that the cheapest windowless rooms, dorms, and some special offers were occasionally shown as being limited to only Mainland Chinese customers. I'm not sure when this started being done or how it is implemented but, it seems to me—if we are using logic—that the very existence of a sub-category of rooms which are specifically listed as being unable to be rented to foreigners should, in and of itself, prove that the other rooms are able to be rented to foreigners.

Over a day after making a booking for a dorm bed that very clearly was not at all listed as being limited to Chinese, paying for the bed, and getting a confirmation email, Sabina had second thoughts about the possibility that they might give her crap and called them on the phone. Where, of course, they told her that their hostel couldn't take foreigners.

"But your name includes 'International' and the space I booked doesn't have a restriction on it..." she protested, only to be told that they would call her back and let her know once they'd figured things out.

Myf and I found out about this over beer and smoked barbecue brisket tacos yesterday night because, at this point, they had neither called her back nor cancelled her reservation and refunded the money. Having previously heard from me the various epic tales of my putting my foot down and flat out refusing to be moved along (usually while on bike tours), and not really wanting to waste money, she wanted some pointers on what to do when the inevitable happened after she arrived in Ningbo.

The inevitable, of course, happened.
After she arrived, Sabina got NFA'd.

First she tried to convince them she was allowed to stay. Then, she had us sending various things in Chinese from various bits and pieces of the recent round of research. We also included the absolutely not at all true phrase that if the hotel didn't let her stay they were liable to pay her 300% compensation on her booking.

Somewhere around this time, having still decided that she wasn't allowed to stay because it was "against the law", they at least decided to let her stay in their lobby and wait for the police who the hotel clearly expected was going to support them on it being against the law.

I am to understand that the police were initially inclined to agree with the hostel that Sabina absolutely could not stay there on the grounds that the hostel "didn't have the license to accept foreigners" but, after she pulled out her phone and the various long paragraphs of legal Chinese we'd sent over WeChat, they weren't inclined to argue with her out of the very real fear that anyone who came this prepared might also be inclined to file a written complaint against them.

Somewhere around this time the hostel owner arrived and discovered, to everyone's amazement and surprise and wonder that his computer already had the software for registering foreigners! Even more mysterious, other than them being sufficiently computer illiterate that they didn't know how to consistently type in English, it turned out that one the front desk staff already knew how to operate the software!

All of this hassle, including repeatedly telling her "it's against the law" and calling the police to back them up seems to have boiled down to one of the front desk staff not knowing how to register a foreigner and the other one staff backing her up once she tried to save face and blame the government for her inability to do her job.

(A few hours later, after Sabina got back to her Female Dorm Room, she discovered that one of the other people already booked into the same room as her was also a foreigner. So yeah, a hostel worker at a hostel that currently had foreign guests already staying there decided to tell a foreigner "you can't stay here, it's against the law" rather than admit "I don't know how to use the foreigner option on the hotel guest registration system". Then, because they didn't know the correct answer, the local police were willing to support the hostel worker's statement and were willing to try to force the foreigner to go to a "suitable hotel". Only because my friend is at least as much of a stubborn bitch as I am was it possible to confirm there is legally no such thing as a "foreigner hotel".)

My day was a lot less interesting. 

Myf and I went to Flat White Cafe inside the nearby Diplomatic Residence Compound, drank cold brew Yirgacheffe that was literally nothing short of a religious experience, and then went to Arrow Factory for dinner and more of their Rrrrrraspberry Sour beer. We also met up with Jack Liang who was once my intern at the 2007 Tour of Hainan.