D10: 房山 → 张坊

June 10, 2022

You know how sometimes some dogs will get so excited by food that they'll eat really really fast and then throw up because they couldn't actually swallow that much?

On account of all the side roads being quite persistently closed off to anyone from outside, there wasn't really anything interesting today. Picking between the provincial and national highways¹, I made the choice to take the flatter of the two not because I remembered being chewed up and spit out by the lesser route in 2012 but because recent notes left on the Map's marked road closures indicated that I would have an easier time with the bigger road.

I should have stopped at that first cluster of restaurants around 11:40 but I wasn't in love with the way they looked and I hadn't quite expected the Road to so neatly avoid going through the center of any town or for me to have absolutely no access to those I saw. As a result, coming on 2pm, with nothing in my stomach since my breakfast oatmeal, I stopped at a Muslim snack shop off the side of a mosque and practically inhaled two incredibly dense and delicious pieces of cumin flavored bread.

This isn't even the first time I've seen China Post renting space in a mosque's shopfronts. It is, however, the largest one I've seen doing so.

About halfway into the second piece of bread, as peristalsis found the bread more work to move downwards than most food items, I got a bit of an internal traffic jam around the middle of my esophagus and I spent the next thirty minutes gagging and vomiting.

About halfway through this ordeal, as my body was somehow getting air past the clog and into my stomach in ways that were then forcing burps (which were helping to dislodge the jam so I guess that's just something the body knows how to do), I thought to try taking a sip of water and I'm honestly not sure if I have words to describe the sheer intensity of how much that fucking hurt!

When I had finally manage to dislodge enough of the jam that I was no longer weeping in pain and drooling spit up, I decided that the rest of lunch would be an ice cream bar and some sweet tea from a petrol station.

Absolutely Forbidden to steal unmetered electricity

Because we don't feel like officially logging that we've cleaned our bathrooms to the requisite standard (I mean "in order to further the requirements of Covid Prevention and Control) these toilets are closed to the public

With that, unless you want to count the shockingly efficient experience I had with the Zhangfang Police regarding my checking in at a hotel in their town, that was the only interesting thing that happened today.

By which I mean to say that nothing interesting happened.

I recognized the names of places I had passed through with Snowflake. I even, at one point, managed to find something that I'd photographed when the two of us had been together. However, we had zigged across the main road then zagged back, taken side roads, seen things..... but, what with 21 new cases yesterday and 4,000+ contacts traced, although they haven't started Closing things down again, things that were thinking about Opening to the outside are going "yeahhhhh, maybe not".

It was a lot more interesting the last time I was here

This is why, when I got to Zhangfang, I had a different lodging issue than my usual drama. By which I mean, I can't tell if any of the hotels (of which there are no small number) are open. They might be but they also might not be, and—on account of not expecting customers—they aren't really making any super special effort to grab attention.

Oddly enough, one of the places which showed up on Maps as having bookable rooms answered their phone and said they were closed, while the most definitively open place I stayed at, is listed as being sold out.

I did a circuit of town. Found the general area I stayed last time (if not the specific hotel). Found that no one had phone numbers on their signs and that the only sign with a number went unanswered and made the call to head uphill to the police station to ask "the blue clothed encyclopedias" for advice.

Having been disappointed by this site in 2012 and 2016, I'm not bothered by it not being open

The guy manning the gate thought my referring to the police as blue encyclopedias was hilarious. Officer Encyclopedia, on the other hand, did not. He also insisted that just because the police are the most obvious people to know everything that's going on in town, this doesn't mean they actually do. Having now insisted that he was neither knowledgeable nor particularly capable of helping me, he then proved himself wrong by giving me directions to two definitively open hotels "one cheap, one expensive".

The cheap one did feel the need to call the police and check that I had been sent by them, and I had had my bonas fided, then they let me sit down at the computer and register myself.

From timestamps and GPS data, including the time spent waiting for an Officer, and the time spent asking me questions, and the time spent insisting he really couldn't be helpful, and the time spent finding the hotel, and the time spent using an unfamiliar to me copy of the Registration Software, it took 26 minutes start to finish.

I'm unfamiliar with this version but we figured it out together

Located on the second floor of the Grain Co-op in a brick building with a 1990s white tile exterior, the old China vibe is strong in this place but the rooms have been renovated to include bathrooms/toilets, the windows have been upgraded from wood frames to aluminum, and the sofa has been reupholstered. The curtains still smell like cigarettes and the back of the TV is the dustiest so far this trip, but it's overall actually quite nice.

I head out for dinner afterwards and a trip to the nearby supermarket in search of supplies that I might want in Hebei where my lack of a health code may prevent me from entering supermarkets.

I expect tomorrow to be considerably less easy.

Standard Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau poster that lists the forms of ID which Foreigners may use to check in and which has been present on the wall at every hotel I've been to in Beijing

Bilingual poster from this district's Exit & Entry Administration that really makes me wish I had the contact of last night's police or EEA (who were also *this district*) so I could rub their faces in it

Check out that wastepaper basket that was once a chamber pot

¹ In this case I'm using the historic definition of highway (meaning a major road between two cities) and not a limited access expressway or high speed road.

Today's ride: 55 km (34 miles)
Total: 631 km (392 miles)

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