I3/2: 石家庄

October 25, 2024

I will not laugh at the taxidermied animals, I will not laugh at the taxidermied animals, I will not laugh at the taxidermied animals

The first time I entered Hebei on this trip, I got an out-of-the-blue message from a guy that I've never once had a conversation with. He added me or I added him (not sure which) back in November 2013, when WeChat still used to periodically scrape your phone contacts¹ and suggest that you add people on account of both of you having each other's numbers saved².

Listed as "CountyName Police Officer," the two of us met in 2012 during an Incident that is one of the Important Episodes in the Origin Story of how I became the kind of person whose insistence that all hotels in China are able to take foreigners rose to the point of teaching other people "you too can write complaint letters to the government."

That year was my second Big Bike Trip. Riding from Beijing to Haikou by way of Yan'an and Gansu. I look back at my (currently offline) journal entries from that Tour and there's nothing to indicate that I was unaware that "hotels sometimes say go away" but there's also nothing to indicate that I thought it important enough to make advance preparations.

The new Natural History Museum at Shijiazhuang Number One Middle is much better than the one they had when I was a teacher

However, there are certain limitations presented with the presentation of taxidermy that wasn't a great example of the art 50 years ago

That trip's first rejection was a downtown-type hotel in Beijing's Fangshan District and happened halfway through check-in when the front desk threw her hands up in despair at trying to figure out the foreigner component of Public Security's Online Hotel Guest Registration System, decided "yeah, actually, you can't stay," and gave me my money back. Going to the police for help with what to do, they drew me a map of local hotels and told me to come back if none of them would take me³.

My second rejection came a few days later on the outskirts of Baoding, in a town called Dawangdian. I wasn't impressed with the hotel options available, went to the police station to ask them if there were any others I hadn't found⁴, and when they told me my citizenship meant I wasn't allowed to stay in the countryside, rather politely gave them the choices of "me in a tent in your parking lot" or "you calling the relevant authorities⁵ and figuring it the fuck out⁶."

Sarcasm notwithstanding, it's really cool that a high school has this kind of collection and display

Similar to many hotel owners on both the 2008 and 2012 trips⁷ the hotel owner in CountyName decided that the easiest way to handle the weirdness of whatever needed to be done differently with me was to walk me down the street to the police station and make my paperwork their problem. Because this was not that uncommon an occurrence, I was expecting one of three scenarios:

The police know what to do. It takes five minutes to complete. Photos are probably taken. Everyone is happy.
The Police don't know what to do, but decide that being informed of my existence is enough. Everyone is happy.
The police don't know what to do or how to do it. At some point during the roughly 90 minutes spent trying to figure it out, someone goes down the street and buys a round of iced lemon tea⁸ or mung bean ice cream. Photos are taken. Everyone is happy.

In CountyName, however, I copped a fourth scenario: "the police don't know what to do and flat out refuse to call the relevant authorities to ask for help."

The rooftop greenhouse where urban students get to Grow Their Own Vegetables is really cool!

Which is why, after far too many hours at the police station, the weather turning cold, and me starting to get hangry, that night in CountyName earned the honorable distinction of being the first time I YELLED at a police officer.

With me informing them that I was sick of their shit, that I had given them all the tools necessary to figure out how to do something not that difficult, that any problem caused by my not being registered was something which I would blame them for, and that I was leaving to walk back to my hotel now, it was somewhere on the spectrum between firm lecture and temper tantrum.
If I have to be perfectly honest, it was much closer to the tantrum end of the spectrum.
So, you can imagine how incredulously surprised I was that it worked!

With them getting to my hotel before I did so that they could admonish the hotel owner to "make very sure absolutely nothing happens to the foreigner," I really wasn't all that surprised to see a police car sitting on the county line the next day when I got to the "Welcome to Come Again" sign, and even less surprised that my definitively removing myself from continuing to be their problem was something that warranted visual confirmation.

It's a foggy (with hints of smog) day outside. The train station is big enough that this means it is also a foggy day INSIDE.

Particularly as he has never once said anything to me (or, so far as I've been aware, interacted with my social media) in the 11 years we've been WeChat contacts, if he hadn't been saved in my contacts as "CountyName Police Officer," I would have no idea who this guy is. But, upon seeing my "I'm in Hebei" post, he thought it reasonable to WELCOME ME to visit his county, or, if that wasn't going to be on my route, to ask if I would be passing through Shijiazhuang cause he'd like to treat me to dinner.

That dinner is not happening on account of I'm fleeing the cold on tonight's overnight train back to Hainan.

But...as has so often been mentioned, my life is summed up in the five words "and then it got weirder" ... his brother works at the Shijiazhuang Central Train Station and Officer Now-Something-Much-More-Important than he was in 2012 apparently told Bro that I'm a Very Important Guest who should be treated very importantly. I'm so important in fact that Bro is super bothered by his inability to help me with getting my bike onto the same train as the one I'm taking at what happens to be peak transit time for one of the busiest stations in the country.

Adding up to nearly 40 minutes (not including the pauses for him to phone some of his co-workers), we have a total of three calls with each other. Copious amounts of "No, really, it's okay. I can use China Rail Cargo. I'm seriously okay with this" on my part interspersed with lots of apologies and polite suggestions from him of ways that I could inconvenience potentially dozens of people in the quest to save 200y before he finally realized that the reason I was saying "it's fine" and "it's not a problem" was because I actually didn't view this as being a problem.

Then, with a short and frustrating interlude spent trying to use their app to schedule pick up, I biked to the train station cargo office and shipped my bike back to Haikou.

¹ Douyin also scrapes your phone book, but Douyin and WeChat are sufficiently in competition with each other that they won't give each other mutual access the way Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google have on the international internet.

The person before me was shipping pig sperm.

² I say "used to" as if it doesn't still do that. It's just that, with the rise of mobile internet and the addition of features like VoIP calls, no one uses their phone number anymore for anything other than taxis and delivery guys.

³ None of them would and I was on my way back when the seventh hotel said okay.

⁴ Super common behavior back before online Maps started having as much information as they do now

⁵ One of whom even spoke to me on the phone and tried to convince me I would be ever so much more comfortable if I went to the city.

⁶ A tactic taught to me by a foreigner who lived in and traveled China in the early 80s.

⁷ And still occasionally happening as recently as 2022

⁸ Especially because "to have tea with the police" is a polite euphemism for "to be called in for an interrogation," I am quite amused by the number of police officers with whom I have had tea.

Today's ride: 9 km (6 miles)
Total: 1,728 km (1,073 miles)

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