D29: 郑州 → 新密

July 4, 2022

I think it an absolute travesty that a hotel room would come with a massage chair and would expect you to pay by the minute to use it

I was wrong about yesterday being my last western food for a while as I first decide that I'm going to revisit Taco Box, and then—upon finding that it's closed this afternoon for a staff outing—go round the corner to Blue Frog instead. I last (and possibly first) ate at a Blue Frog in 2015 when my WarmShowers host in Wuyi took me to the one in his city.

Despite the fact that I was less than a week out from Shanghai at that point, this was many long years before Haikou had places like Chimac or Blaze Barbecue and I was well and truly impressed by it at the time. However, in comparison to the previous two meals with Philipp or the western food I can currently get at home, it just came across as overpriced and not very exciting.

Which building is ugliest? The modern "gothic" styled one...

Or this late 80s charmer that I'm told was once the Top Restaurant in Zhengzhou?

View of my bike from the table at the Blue Frog

The staff giving me the side eye over the loaded bicycle which I wouldn't allow to be parked 100m away in "proper" bike parking¹, and insisting on using their phone translate to "talk" to me instead of noticing that I was using Chinese with them surely didn't help with my overall opinion.

Dull, dull, dull, hot city roads for most of the day with the rare distraction of an 18th century bilingual (Manchu and Chinese) stele with an imperial edict on it found beneath a tangled collection of overpasses and underpasses where multiple main roads and railroads met and all the different forms of traffic needed to be separated from each other.

Little half forgotten pavilions like this, tucked among the tangle of overpasses, are some of my favorites

This dude, in his tacticool uniform, standing at attention in the full sun next to a souped up SUV, isn't even police .... just a security guard whose employers want to look SECURE

This is currently my lock screen wallpaper

Flushing the toilet and doing up your trousers are of EQUAL IMPORTANCE

After thinking that the sheer number of open and operating test sites I had seen the day before would mean no problem with getting my fresh Covid swab today, I also found myself in a situation where—after the ninth or eleventh closed test site—I had to actually detour round to the People's Hospital in Xingyang for one of the most pain free experiences this Tour in terms of a database actually accepting my data².

After making the decision not to go looking for a particular village that I'd bookmarked last year after a conversation with one of the wanghong I follow on Douyin, the roads continued to be large, full, and too sunny after this but they were at least no longer urban.

Once turning towards the national road, and then when on the national road, I would eventually get my rural. First in the form of the GPS being determined to take me on the route that was the shortest distance between two points and then on account of this particular national road being one of those ones that didn't get widened and straightened and embiggened on account of expressways having already been built by the time anyone was thinking of that.

Shortly after the sign for the "Party Themed Park"

Beautiful, beautiful scenery and temples and old farmhouses abounded for this part of the day but they competed with the knowledge that I'd dawdled too long in the unpleasant bits of city and no longer had the luxury of dawdling as sunset was coming soon.

As the sky darkened, I regularly considered stopping to turn on my headlight but the passing cars always illuminated just enough and then, after my originally chosen "closest hotel" turned out to be quite obviously a "closed hotel", I was in the Streelight Zone and didn't have to worry.

What a thoroughly random place to be selling clothing

A modern "Mao Zedong Thought Forever" which, even though MZD Thought is one of the core tenets of the modern Party, is not something I expect to see painted on a wall

Bear in mind though, this village also had "the People's Cadres serve the people"

Booking online at the closest bookable place, I arrived at, per the Complaint Letter that's going to make some people very very unhappy, "approximately 8:54 pm".

Too exhausted to have gotten food before showing up and completely dry in terms of water, I was a pathetic mess when I collapsed gratefully on the lobby sofa with the a/c pointed directly at me.

And then, they made the mistake that's been made before by hotels that actually want to take me but which don't completely believe I really do know how to work the Registration System myself. They called the police to ask "how". Not "if" but "how".

Commemorating the people who donated money for the rebuilding of said temple

They believed me well enough on it being okay, they just didn't believe that I could do it myself and they wanted guidance.

The guidance which they got, however, was "tell her to fuck off to a Foreigner Hotel, you aren't licensed, she can't stay".

So, with the partial support of the boss (he wouldn't directly give me the number of his local police station), I made a call at 9:03 to Emergency Services and they called the local station to dispatch officers to handle it. So the local station called me and told me "your lodging problem [that we caused] isn't our problem and we're not coming". Which meant, another call to Emergency Services 28 minutes later and them eventually showing up at 9:43pm.

Rural shrine around the time I was trying to get back to the main road and having problems because of a newly built expressway

On the one hand, the time spent clambering around checking this (not particularly unique or special) shrine out cut into my daylight. On the other hand, it was a steep hill and I needed the rest

At least partially hydrated by this point (but still unfed), I was pissed. I did not, however, start yelling until the police refused to accept my actual written documentation of actual relevant law as the rules and regulations which actually need to be followed.

Still no go. Now we have to wait for someone from the Public Security Bureau Exit and Entry Administration to show up. He'll arrive at 10:10, in plainclothes, refuse to provide a name or badge number or show me ID, will look at my written documentation (which includes a statement from the Provincial Public Security Administration that "our province has no regulations limiting foreigners to certain kinds of lodging), will photograph my written documentation, and will continue to insist I must go to the five star hotel.

Great Leap Forward era waterworks with vandalized slogans

My lone condition on going anywhere else is that I either get something that contradicts the literal pile of written regulations they've ignored or the police pay for it.... and, eventually, they actually agree to this.

Except that, once I'm over at the new hotel, and I've been checked in, and I'm in my room, I decide "may as well get the original room that I didn't stay in refunded" and CTrip informs me that they can't, because they've already given my money to the original hotel, because he already gave the cost of my upgrade to a "suitable hotel" to the police!

In order to cover up their failure to correctly tell the hotel how to operate a registration system which has a foreigner option, they shook the hotel owner down for money, in front of a foreigner, and in ways that leave a digital evidence trail. Not exactly the smartest thing they could have done, but bullies rarely are the sharpest spoons in the knife drawer.

On account of everything being in order, everything seems to be in order

I'm running into a hiccup with submitting the Complaint but I will do it and this guy will regret having ever met me

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¹ Per the usual "it isn't me making up these rules" appeal to authority, they were particularly insistent that the mall security would give them shit over my bike being in the "wrong place" which might have even worked with me if not for Taco Box—in the same mall—bending over backwards to find me a safe line-of-vision spot the night before.

² Particularly since it's already asking for ID number, and this is information which is tied to (but not encoded in) the ID, there is absolutely no reason for a local Health Code registration form to be requiring that Chinese citizens pick their ethnicity off of a drop down list.

My NAT from this afternoon won't show on my phone and this programming oversight is somehow my fault. I yelled at them until they figured out how to use a police app to look it up

Honestly, given what this room costs, it's not very nice

Today's ride: 80 km (50 miles)
Total: 1,737 km (1,079 miles)

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