D21: 鸡泽 → 曲周

June 23, 2022

I am truly astonished by the number of times I've made the mistake of asking for a bottle of Dayao soda. This is the Bazooka Bubblegum flavor. There's also a "spoiled" Fanta variety.

Even if the preceding day's fuckwittery was almost entirely my own fault, I am in need of a couple extra hours of sleep and would strongly consider making today a "not getting out of bed" day if not for the whole cloak and dagger bit where the hotel is so damn proud that their lying to the police has kept me out of forced quarantine.

I do not share this opinion. I feel that what has kept me out of quarantine is a combination of factors including my not meeting any of the conditions for forced quarantine, my being the sort of person who has State Council articles bookmarked alongside the National Health Commission guidelines and the current list of all currently recognized medium- and high-risk areas, and my being the kind of person who is absolutely willing to use that ammunition in the right way.

I may get quite stroppy and rude with the police. I may yell at them on occasion. I may yell at them on more than just "occasion". But I don't lie to them. I especially don't lie to them about things where I can easily be caught out as having done anything but tell the absolute truth¹.

Your daily Hebei anti bed wetting advertisement

I am now deep within "Premature Ejaculation Cure" territory

These ladies have not only lied, they've probably done it on cameras² that aren't so easily erased as the hotel's are, and they've put me in a situation where I may have to say something directly in contradiction to what they've said.

After breakfast, a Covid swab from one of the kiosks that completely separates the test staff from the public, and the discovery that—like emptying my bladder beforehand—I should not fill my stomach beforehand, I get another hot, flat day of dull cycling across the plains.

Gee, she didn't have any problem figuring out how to register me

I don't love the idea of normalized community testing of this sort, but it sure is convenient

I mostly manage to do it not on the main road so I've got at least a little bit of scenery to contend with. However, I've also got a disturbing creaking grinding noise on almost every downstroke and I've forgotten that incremental changes to disc brakes are one of those things you need to periodically do so I've also got a lack of stopping power to bother me as well.

Nerves frazzled and with not a single interesting thing seen all day, I arrive in Quzhou early enough to go looking for a bike shop. The Giant which I find first is so far and away from being a bike shop that I don't even remember to get photos of them. The Merida, which turns out to have only been about 50m away from me when I pointed myself at the Giant, comes across as super knowledgeable and super professional and seems to do a great job³.

While it's likely that the problem was in the BB and not the pedal (because QR pedals means I swapped them), it's equally likely that whatever he did exacerbated it

While in the Merida, and partly with the goal of not putting myself in a position where anyone in uniform asks me "where did you spend last night" (so as to avoid contributing documentation to proving that last night's hotel lied to the police), I use the phone whose version of Maps tells me things like "this hotel is Chinese citizens only" or "this hotel welcomes foreigners" and book the cheapest room at the Quzhou State Guesthouse on account of it not only being one of the few places in town which doesn't explicitly say "Chinese only" but also being the only place which explicitly says "non Chinese are okay".

As a result, it will take two hours of increasingly disorderly conduct, at least six uniformed officers, and at least two plainclothes officials before I am granted permission to check in.

I tried, but ultimately failed, to help her

This will feature both old favorites such as we don't have the non-existent license required to accept foreigners and you should go to one of the hotels which—despite explicitly listing themselves as Chinese citizens only—is allowed to take foreigners, and new wrinkles like "the proof of Covid testing that you've been using for the past three weeks on account of our province's broken database query system isn't acceptable proof" and "we aren't accepting travelers who were in Beijing at anytime in the past two weeks⁴".

Although he was a serious pain in the ass of the English leech variety⁵, I rather like the gadfly fellow hotel customer who forces himself into the conversation while I'm recording some of interactions with the Front Desk as you can literally watch me go from very aggressive and very unpleasant screaming banshee towards them to responding to him with a quiet and polite "I'm not worried in the slightest. I'm yelling at them because it's a useful tactic for getting what I want."

Clearly too small a hotel for foreigners

For my own peace of mind, I need these moments that document that I'm not actually an angry bitch, I just play one for the audience.

Come morning, when checking out, I'll say to the Front Desk that randomly telling foreigners "you can't stay" is shitty, immoral behavior and they should know better than to do it in the future.

They will demur that this is not their fault but actually the county PSB for saying that they don't meet the standards to take foreigners and that only three hotels in the county seat have the "card reader" that allows passports to be registered. Forgetting for a moment that—like the license to take foreigners—there is no such card reader, out of the four hotels (the three which are "foreigner friendly" and themselves), they are the only one that publicly lists themselves as taking foreigners.

Why yes, I have thrown every non breakable thing I could find behind the counter on the floor

I point out that I registered myself on their computer just fine without this mythical card reader but they insist. It's absolutely the PSB's fault. That's why so many officers had to come the night before. They needed to get permission. It wasn't the hotel's fault. Not at all. Not even when you consider that the hotel approved my booking. It is totally the PSB and their requirement for a non-existent license and a non-existent card reader.

As a result, although it will take until after this Tour is over, I've got yet another place that I'll be writing letters about.

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¹ Over the years, when the detectives have oh so nicely demanded my presence yet again for yet another question and answer session about the "awesome gift" that asshole sent me in the mail, one of the hardest things to bite my tongue on has been avoiding saying how deeply offended I am that they think I would do such a poor job at drug smuggling.

Forgetting the whole part where I straight up wouldn't import contraband at all, if I was going to do it, I would have done a better job!

I'll have to remember to translate this. There's truly a wealth of pointless fields you aren't required to fill in, like blood type

It's also working off one of the databases where I can list my nationality as Chinese

² As an American living in China, it boggles me that my country's supposed to be much more professional police forces have people who have problems with bodycams.

Sure, cameras and countersigned evidence envelopes made it really hard for the detectives during my Incident to completely blot out their having forgotten to take the Tramadol from my fridge their first time at my apartment, but cameras are also what protected those officers in Xinglong when I walked myself into wall.

³ Except for the part where he also seems to have forgotten to put an important spacer back and, from about 10km onwards on the next day, I have to deal with a wobbly crankset until I can get to another bike shop.

⁴ And now you're not just in violation of vaguely worded potential unclear things that have been muddled by decades of deliberate misinformation by people who don't want to deal with headaches caused by people like me, you are also in violation of recent explicit orders from the Central Government.

⁵ Seriously, Dude, this is not the time to be asking me how your kid can do better at learning a foreign language.

Today's ride: 33 km (20 miles)
Total: 1,220 km (758 miles)

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