I caught tonight's police in two lies. 

The first happened fairly shortly after they arrived at my room. They hadn't yet told me to go and I hadn't yet told them I wasn't going. 

"What do you mean, before the boss found out you were a foreigner and said he was closed for business [and you were disruptive and insisted that he was not closed] he was talking to you about price? He shouldn't have been doing that. All the hotels in our small town are currently closed because of Covid restrictions."

For a moment there, before I thought about the industrial sized hand sanitizer spritzer on the table in his driveway or the Covid specific logbook he had on said table, I believed them; I actually thought I might be getting the boss man in a wee bit of trouble. By the time we went downstairs though to register me on a computer that, funnily enough, had "overseas hotel guest" as one of the options, I'd long since realized they were lying. Hadn't specifically caught them redhanded but I'm not dumb and I knew. 

The paper Covid logbook for their local CDC to get the data from and which therefore asked for similar but different data than what the police would be getting from someone swiping his or her ID card to check-in served, however, as my smoking gun.

Closed places that don't want to be not open have all sorts of ways of being defiant and none of those involve writing down in ink, with today's date, that you have two new guests.

As for the other lie, they were local beat cops in a rinkydink town 12km from the edge of the nearby city. It's entirely possible that they didn't know Foreigner Licenses don't exist. It's entirely possible that their supervisor at the county level did in fact explicitly and specifically say that I must go to the city 12km away.

Given that their response to seeing my letter from their provincial Ministry of Public Security saying that their province has no restrictions on foreigners staying at hotels, was to backpedal with "the hotel's computer won't be able to register foreigners or anyone that doesn't have a Chinese ID card" though, I'm rather skeptical about the actual not knowing and think, instead, they were just flinging shit at the wall and hoping it would stick.

Not only was foreigner a menu option on the system, but the system was a simplified version of the Blue Registration System where "foreign hotel guest" is a giant labeled icon on the main screen. To miss it, you'd literally have had to have never once looked at the screen when picking options. It's not like the green or brown variants where "foreigner" is hidden in a menu no one ever looks at.

As for the hotel owner, it's entirely possible he wasn't lying when he said he didn't know the police's phone number and therefore couldn't call them to ask for advice on registering me. After all, since his hotel shares a wall with the police station, he probably isn't in the habit of contacting them by phone.

Obviously, he was lying about being closed. But that was a non-issue. This is me we're talking about.

I'd pointed myself at the police station after dinner, had found their non-emergency open to the public area closed, had decided against calling 110 to be let in, and had gone to the hotel next door. While asking me questions like where I'd come from today and where I'd been yesterday and the day before that and the day before that, I'd thoughtlessly included "passport" and "pre filled Foreigner Registration Form" in the list of "all the things I have" that would make checking me in "not an issue" and as soon as I became foreigner, the hotel became closed.

I responded to this by walking the rest of the way in to their courtyard driveway, leaning my bike against the wall, and saying "if you'd just call the police, they'll tell you it's fine" but he wasn't interested in even trying. So, against their loud protests of not being open, I went upstairs, found an open room, went back downstairs to grab panniers, and told them I'd be waiting in the room for the police but to make sure they knew to knock first as I needed a shower.