I suppose it's inevitable that I couldn't make it through an entire province without having at least one altercation involving the police.

Even with the dust scarf over my hair, I'm no longer in the parts of China where it's reasonable for someone to potentially mistake me for being Chinese. Besides which, for all that is in possible to mistake me for being Chinese, if someone does mistake me for not being a foreigner, I look like a politically sensitive ethnic minority who is more likely to be on the receiving end of discrimination.

However, once the police are called to the guesthouse, that's what the wife claims. That they thought I was Chinese. How exactly they think anyone would believe that they would have continued to think this after I'd pushed my bike through their first floor teahouse, asked about first floor rooms, complained about being made to climb stairs when they had unmade-up rooms on the first floor that could be made up, and had followed the husband upstairs to look at multiple different classes (and prices) of rooms is beyond me. Cause for all that my tones and pronunciation and all that are uncommonly good for a random foreigner, they're still very far off of anything you might call "standard".

I picked the 80元 a night a room. The bed was soft enough. The bathroom didn't smell. It seemed that heat was included in the price. (The remote for the heater disappeared between my paying for the room and my coming back from dinner and I'd already had sufficient confrontation that I decided not to raise a fuss).

Then I followed the husband back downstairs to the check-in and got my passport out of my handlebar bag. He'd already sat down at the computer when I offered to do that for him cause "passports are a little harder than ID cards" and for one hot moment, it looked like he actually was going to let me do it.
Until the wife freaked out.

Cause they don't have the (nonexistent) license to accept foreigners.

She was still willing to let me stay. Just not willing to let me register. And I, in my pigheaded stubbornness of having already skimmed the posters on the wall from the Public Security Bureau about "one guest, one ID" and "all guests must register" and "fines for both hotels and guests in the event that an overnight guest is unregistered" insisted that my not registering was an absolutely no go. Insisted that if they'd just let me sit down at the computer, I'd handle it.

I hadn't eaten dinner yet and while I wasn't necessarily feeling grumpy or unfed or unreasonable, by the time the police had arrived, my behavior had edged far enough past "unreasonable" that it started approaching "disturbing the public order". 

After a few rounds of 'keep away' that were never going to work in their favor because I'm a lot bigger and a lot more determined on this particular topic, I took the mouse and keyboard and simply registered myself. And when they wouldn't tell me a room number, I picked one at random.

As a result, even though I really was kind of out of line, when the police arrived and started in with the usual "you can't be registered here" they were faced with "I'm already registered here" and, of course, since no one has any idea how to unregister me (even though, in this case, the registration software had randomly decidedly of its own volition to include a picture of a Chinese woman and great efforts had to be undertaken to fix this) both the original two officers and the two higher level back-up officers that showed up some twenty minutes later were forced to accept that when I say: "I do not accept that you have the authority to arbitrarily enforce rules without providing those rules to me in writing" it's a whole lot easier for everyone to just let me stay where I want to stay.