After a surprisingly good buffet breakfast, I cast a gloomy eye at the weather report, double check to make sure everything is properly waterproofed, and check out of my hotel. The rear tire has gone flat again but I noticed a Xidesheng both on the ride to the police station and the ride from that had that nebulously hard to describe quality of looking like a Bike Shop¹ as opposed to merely being a place which sold bicycles.

And, indeed, it was a Bike Shop.

The owner, Zhang, opened up about 6 or 8 months ago and is rapidly taking completely over the Cheng County biking scene in ways that I'm not entirely sure the competing Merida or Giant yet realize will probably be good for them in the long run. The bike club member who takes me out to lunch walks me by those shops and rather tactlessly tells me in front of their less than enthusiastic owners "we used to hang out here before Zhang's shop opened" which is how I find out that the young guy who had been doing the greasy wrenching was actually the owner and that this guy was just someone who does group rides and sits in the shop drinking tea.

Because he once made it into the top 10 in a nationwide mountain bike race² during his time on Team Gansu, although he has mostly left the world of professional sports behind, Zhang still gets a monthly stipend from the provincial sports authority.

It's nothing huge but it's enough to ensure that he'll always have food on the table and clothes on his back even if he fails at his post-athlete attempts at making a career for himself cause, even though the Sports Academy system isn't quite as crazy as what you might think if you've only ever read Mao's Last Dancer³, it's still not conducive to raising people who thrive outside of that world and it's embarrassing to the nation as a whole to have an Olympian begging in the Beijing subways⁴.

And so, my tube gets patched, my brakes get tweaked, I get a new tire, and the heavens open up to start pouring down rain like you wouldn't believe until it increasingly becomes apparent, I'm staying in Cheng again tonight.

At around 5pm or so, I'm thinking maybe I should go to the police station again and let them know my situation, but the locals talk me out of it. I didn't cause this problem; they did.

Instead, I call Emergency Services. I explain that I'm a foreigner, that I'm staying in town again tonight, and will I be allowed to act like a normal person or does the government plan on picking up my hotel bill again? Obviously, the person on the other end thinks it preposterous that I expect the government to pay for my vacation lodging and it takes some questioning of supervisors and some call backs (one from them, one from me) before I get my answer.

Go to any hotel you want to. Call us when you get there. We'll send the police to come register you.

I book in at a place just round the corner from the bike shop. It's Gansu so nothing online booking will accept my English name but 外国朋友 (foreign friend) is accepted and, after they close up shop, I grab the luggage I'll need for spending all day tomorrow closeted in my hotel room working on something UNESCO related for the Beijing Foreign Languages University Press.

A police car with flashies on is already parked outside the hotel and they joke that public security is waiting for me, that the hotel must have seen my booking and called them.

This turns out not to be the case but I still walk into a lobby full of relatively senior officers and more police coming out of the elevator. The 100th Anniversary of the Communist Party is coming up so flashy overstaffed random inspections are currently ongoing and this hotel has just finished being checked out.

The second time I'm interrupted when I try to say "but the Emergency Services hotline specifically told me", I get my phone and start recording. However, although that video is on my Facebook, and although it's been widely publicized in foreigner groups in China, I'm not going to post it here as it isn't something I want my name easily attached to.

Not because I did anything wrong, per se (if you want to watch the video, just ask me) but because it's embarrassing. For them.

Shout shout shout. You will listen to me. Shout shout angry. I don't have to give you anything in writing. Shout. Loud. Shout shout. If I say it is so, it is so. My uniform makes my words law.

No, you're wrong. Not only are you wrong, as a police officer you are held to higher standards of being right. You do not have the authority to lie to me. You do not outrank the people who wrote the laws nor do you outrank the people I spoke to today. 

And as my ranting back and refusal to be interrupted again once I get started ramps up, the officers whose faces can be seen look increasingly more uncomfortable until someone butts in from off camera with "I just got off the phone with reporting your situation to higher authority and they said you can stay. Please stop yelling at us."

¹ It's possible for a place which sells quite expensive bicycles (such as the Tianshui Giant) to fail to reach the standard of being a Bike Shop and to merely be a bike shop. 

² I forget if 4th place or 3rd

³ The protagonist of which is a self-centered asshole whose failure to think before acting made things incredibly difficult for hundreds of other people

⁴ True story