The plan was to make it to a place with convenient transport to Luoyang and to leave my bike there when going to meet Margaret. Her departure date has changed about a million times though for reasons (none of them her fault) ranging from the prosaic to the Kafkaesque.

Separate from Xixia having a bike shop that I'm comfortable with allowing to work on my bike¹, the chafed bits of delicate skin from the past few days sweaty abuse would prefer that I not ride today.

Also, the PSB wants me to get a Covid test.

It started last night, as so many things do, with my hotel check in. I'd stayed late at the bike shop quite on purpose as 5pm is a much easier the to "kick the hot potato" than 9pm is. Then, I'd picked a hotel across the street from a police station.

Getting into the room was a surprisingly hassle free experience. Being as my hotel was part of a national chain, it seems that the front desk had gotten simple training of the "how to record a foreigner's basic information without actually attempting to operate the Registration System" sort that was acceptably not actually within the rules before Covid but which really isn't okay now.

The hassle started after I was in the room and not only hit upon all the usual excuses (like not having a license to take foreigners), it also failed to take into consideration that if I was any kind of problem then the room which I was in had already been contaminated.

I don't care who told you what, I'm not leaving the room. If you or anyone else has a problem with that, you can call the police. If it's the police who have told you I need to leave, then they need to come here so I can tell them to their face that they can leave.

Twenty or thirty minutes go by and I get a call that the police are in fact here. They're downstairs. One is anyways. Here to register me. The officer is a 协警 with a single stripe and no florets on his epaulets at least 5 or 10 years older than me and, judging by how quickthinking he wasn't, his lack of rank didn't come from choosing to join the force late in life.

I'm not allowed to sit down at the computer but he's reasonably passive when, after I discover that the cable is too short for me to just take the keyboard away, I loom over him to type my data.

Many pictures have been taken of the relevant parts of my passport as well as the filled in Registration Screen. They've been sent to at least two WeChat groups and I'm being prevented from either pressing save and submit (which shouldn't work without pictures uploaded within the system), or teaching them how to upload the pictures currently on phones, or teaching them how to trick the system² into thinking you've uploaded a picture when you haven't³.

This is when the pibbie shows up, wipes the system, and gets the hotel manager to sit down and do the whole thing by herself. The pibbie doesn't like me photographing her. She tells a man in plainclothes who had been there all along to make me delete my photos from my phone.

"Sure, let me just finish sending them."

"No. Delete them. Do not share them."

"Mmmhmmm." I say as I share them with a group of a few hundred people, turning the phone so that he can see they've been shared. "I can delete them now."

I continue to be equally as delightful and end up being sent back to my room without getting to see how they solve the problem of the system wanting a photo and no one apparently having a cable to connect with the computer to share any of the many photos that have been taken of me and my passport.

Back in my room there are follow up questions mostly yelled through the door but also over the phone. And they want me to have a Covid test. They really want that I should somehow already have one that's less than 48 hours old but faced with the potential responsibility over being at fault for allowing me to stay when I've consistently been in low risk areas versus the responsibility for being the person who bothered the CDC at 11pm, I'm allowed to make my own decisions on when to go to the hospital to get a test.

I do go to the hospital.

I do not, however, get a Covid test.

The test site staff tried so hard to get me into their system before they sent me to the main entrance of the hospital and the registration office. The triage nurse at the entrance, however, wouldn't let me in.

Kick the hot potato. 

Maybe if I leave for the police station (to attempt to get a piece of paper I already know they won't issue to a foreigner) someone else will be on shift by the time I come back.

Getting about halfway to the taxi rank, I yell back "if the PSB comes to my hotel tonight and asks me why I didn't get tested, I'm showing them the pictures I took of you!" This gets her running after me shouting "stop, stop" but I'm already in a cab and I'm not coming back.

¹ At least to the extent of their comfort level. This means the I know it's fucking simple but I can't figure it out issue with my Patterson Drive two speed crankset remains an issue wherein I have a very heavy slightly inefficient single speed crankset.

² The last two times I was in Henan were respectively 2008 and 2002 so I've never used their registration system before, but it's a local fork of the extremely common Blue Registration System and I'm very familiar with its quirks.

³ It involves Windows Paint