Dr. M and I have a disagreement about an English language neologism. As someone from the UK, she obviously has more authority than I do, but I'm not quite sure.

Is the collective noun for the sort of Livestreamers who wander around in public an "embuggerance" or is a "twat" as in "one twit, two twats"?

As previously mentioned, the hotel we spent the night in is a wannabe bougie¹ boutique-type place in the yaodongs that used to host the local government offices. They're the constructed sort rather than the type where someone burrowed into a hillside but they've all got the single big window at the front and the arched interior wall. One row has been made into dining and cooking facilities, two are hotel rooms, and the other two have been made into a small museum on local revolutionary history.

I don't remember if the twats harassed us during the earliest round of coffee on the open terrace overlooking the village (and a large, unlovely bypass bridge). I know that by the time they came by to look at us in the private gardens shared by each pair of yaodong in our row (still obviously in pyjamas, still obviously ungroomed or ready to face the outside world) they needed to be firmly and repeatedly told off and told to go away.

They also needed to be told not to follow us into or around the museum and that we weren't going to sing on camera (or at all) for them.

I'd had my usual² morning oatmeal while we coffeed but Dr. M's stomach was still in that place where nothing short of fluffy buttermilk pancakes drizzled with golden syrup and accompanied by clotted cream and fresh blueberries was going to make her want to eat before noon. 

As the person responsible for us doing far shorter distances than she's used to on her own, it was therefore my responsibility to make sure we had enough pannier snacks like mini chocolate bars and beef jerky. But, unless it's a small winding thing that goes up a mountain, the idea of a road in China where you can go 20+km without seeing anywhere to eat is so alien to me that it just didn't occur to me.

Around 4pm, with nothing but the red dates that everyone kept offering us, we finally found a roadside village on the approach to Jia County. They were getting ready for a Temple Fair which meant that we should have had lots of fun distractions while also being the kind of distraction that people talk about for years (remember that time the touring cyclists came?).

Unfortunately, there was a twat of livestreamers with meter and a half tall poles with frames for multiple phones at one time and they would not leave us the fuck alone. 

The breaking point came when—having decided that foreigners eating lunch required extreme close ups of the food entering their mouths in the exact same way that food enters the mouths of normal, non-foreign people—a dozen locals³ had pushed in the livestreamer-created crowd to see what everyone was looking at. 

You would think that picking up my bowl of noodles, turning my back to the crowd, and hunching over my food with one hand in front of my face would have seeped through the wall of ignorance and bad behavior, but it only resulted in someone coming round the table to look at me from that side.

Needless to say, we did not stay for the rest of the Temple Fair.

Ten kilometers later, having calmed ourselves with amusing obelisks⁴ and poorly written wall slogans about eradicating illiteracy, a restaurant owner asked if she could take a photo with us, and (after asking for permission) Dr. M got up and hugged her.

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¹ Given the hell† that I would have unleashed on the owner for the number of already broken or improperly‡ installed things, its probably a really good thing that Dr.M picked up the bill for this set of rooms.

† Taking into account our different countries of origin, we are roughly equivalent on the social class side of socioeconomic backgrounds. However, I grew up with a lot less money, and even if both of us will walk off in disgust over a 25y charger cable that becomes 35y when it's time to pay, I get a lot angrier than her over "quality" prices not equalling "quality" services.

‡ In addition to the already mentioned electric short in my shower, there was a motion sensing gate alarm that verbally welcomed every puff of wind with a tinny "欢迎光临 恭喜发财," and the combined lack of bathroom vents and S-traps in the drains when installing the wet rooms at the back of our caves meant that the sewer gas build up overnight was on the edge of "pass out and knock your head on the floor" levels of lethal.

² It's not only a good steady source of energy, it ensures that I have a crap while I've still got Known Quality toilets.

³ It's possible, even likely, that the livestreamers were locals themselves, but they were younger and we're therefore held to a different standard of behavior.

⁴ Glory to the Roadbuilders!