May 18, 2021
D33: 红墩界 → 乌审旗
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Even though the near liter of yogurt I got last night at dinner was truly amazing and absolutely the sort of thing I would have wanted for breakfast, I wasn't interested in being in any situation where I ended up talking to the restaurant owner again. I never particularly felt unsafe or anything like that and once I got to the point of explicitly being loud and angry with the saying "no", he finally stopped asking, but I shouldn't have had to.
This was a bathroom down the hall kind of place and, even though I neither saw nor heard from him after I was shown my room, his behavior meant that I ended up seriously considering perfectly ordinary things like my not having a key to my room or the flimsy bathroom lock and ended up deciding not to shower.
As the aphorism goes "men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will hurt them" and it's times like these that I'm really glad to be so much larger than the average Chinese woman.
If it weren't for the owner's creepy behavior, I'd absolutely recommend this place. Very obviously well insulated building, double paned windows (with about a 3 inch gap) to help keep warm in the winter, a massive hit water heater in the bathroom, a washing machine, great food. It's just, you know, the part where he tried to get me to prostitute myself over $15 worth of food and bed and wouldn't take a simple "no" as an answer.
After packing up and triple checking the room for anything left behind I waited until I was sure he was in the restaurant portion of the other building and very quickly left. Even though I hadn't deleted his WeChat yet (added before the Question), the lone message I'd gotten¹ (after the Question) gave me zero confidence that this was the sort of person who would tell me if I'd left anything.
I remembered seeing two restaurant s near the government building and headed that direction in the hopes of not needing to pull out my stove for a morning bowl of oatmeal.
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One of the two was open and, even better, they also had homemade Mongolian yoghurt. Not as good as the previous night's, it was still delicious, and by the time I'd finished the far too small bowl they'd given me, I ended up invited to the family table to join them in their breakfast of Things Americans Don't Consider Breakfast.
I'm not sure why shredded potatoes fried Chinese style with green pepper aren't breakfast and hashbrowns are but it's simply the way things are. Big pieces of succulent reservoir fish also aren't breakfast food. Nor are pickles.
North from Hongdunjie to the ruins of Tongwan City, I detoured for a bit to a demolished primary school that confused me. The line of yaodong along the hill were the only buildings remaining and I would have sworn from the style and construction method that these were quite old cave homes. Probably 19th century, they oughtn't be any later than the 1950s.
Except.... they were in a nice communal line-up like a Production Brigade or something else from the 60s and onwards and the type of schoolyard which they edged looked for all the world like it might have been an 80s era Hope School.
The most recent sign of occupation inside one of the yaodong was some posters from 2008 and 2009 used to patch over some detioriating plaster.
I'm glad I went with my morning detours to the primary school, along the original redbrick road which the school had been alongside instead of back to the pavement, and a strange Garden of Concrete Things just as Tongwan came into view as it would turn out that Tongwan was closed.
There are different degrees of closed. All the barriers were things which one could get around if one really wanted to. When stymied by a barrier to the point of giving up, I even had two different people at two different locations offer to take me the rest of the way to the Site for a small fee.
Thing is, I've wandered around Tongwan before in 2018 and, at least until the museum opens in July, I'm not going to see anything I haven't already seen and I'm not going to have any more context than I already didn't have last time.
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I'm just going to have to eventually go back a third time. Some time perhaps when I'm visiting Inner Mongolia for more than two days.
Sat under a tree charging my phone, fussing with my camera, and editing a video through the hottest part of the day. Easily could have sat longer but a guy in a car pulled over and sat down next to me and, as we chatted, kept inching closer to me.
Separate from my actively attempting to radiate polite disinterest, I was unshowered, sweaty, and on my third day in a row wearing the same jersey.
Late lunch in Inner Mongolia in the village where I stayed in 2018. Couldn't remember which restaurant on the not very long street front I'd eaten at but if I'd been positively impressed (I'm not sure if I was) then it clearly wasn't the one I ended up eating at.
South, south, south, south through some aggressively pretty countryside that was mostly dusty brown fields just starting to show hints of green but which was occasionally grasslands or desert.
With lots of sunlight, lots of energy, and skin that wasn't yet irritated by my return to the saddle, I passed up the next lodging option to continue almost all the way back to the border with Shaanxi and a giant truckstop town.
The hotel that I picked was perfectly willing to let me stay. They were thrilled that a foreigner had picked them (more or less completely at random) over any of the other more or less identical hotels on the street.
It's just that the computer didn't like me.
There was a time when I might have thought the lack of a foreigner option (Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau were bundled in with Chinese citizens) for registration was because I wasn't allowed somewhere. That time was before I encountered a foreigner registration option where the valid types of ID which a foreigner could provide included People's Liberation Army ID.
This software seemed to be generally the same as what I'd come across the last time in Inner Mongolia when the police came to the hotel to do battle not with me but with the computer. As I'm in the same Banner², chances are pretty good it's the same software. I didn't get pictures then and I still didn't get them this time.
Supporting my theory of "badly programmed", there was a tab under "guests currently at the hotel" where someone could filter by "foreigners" and, yet, no way to actually register a foreigner.
Once the hotel caved to my suggestion that they call the police, the police—of course—told them I couldn't stay.
So, using my phone, I called the police back and said "well actually, I can" to which there was surprisingly little hemming and hawing, a "I'll call my supervisor and get back to you", and—at just about the time that I was getting ready to call them again—a police car with two officers coming to register me.
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¹ No, it wasn't a dick pic
² Instead of towns and counties, Inner Mongolia has Banners.
Today's ride: 51 km (32 miles)
Total: 1,115 km (692 miles)
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