After a morning marked by the discovery that the fap tile¹ in my bathroom is Fan Bingbing rather than Angelababy² and more emergency notices to be translated, it's time to cross into Guangdong again. This time, however, it will stick.

As with most of the other crossings between the two provinces, Hunan cares about people entering from Guangdong while Guangdong is so unconcerned that they can't even be bothered to have one of those shipping containers turned mobile office. 

A massive descent is interrupted by another emergency work break that's nice on account of the scenery and miserable on account of the brightness and heat of the sunlight. It was, however, on a road that didn't look like it was going to produce any shops any time soon, and the first reasonable place to stop after getting the message. Of course, within moments of getting back on the road and finishing the descent, I come to a perfectly usable Qing Dynasty roadhouse with stone benches and shade and a mountain spring out the back. 

The day's scenery isn't much inclined to look anywhere near as good in the photos as it looks to be biking through but it's the kind of green beauty with dramatic skies that makes me want to just stop and look rather than keep moving. I compromise with myself by moving even less fast than I usually do.

With impeccable timing, I stop for a popsicle just as yet another pull out my laptop level work break is announced. My liaison quotes something historic about a general who was said to have won a battle so quickly that his wine was still warm from the brazier, then modifies it to say I work so efficiently that my popsicle hasn't yet begun to melt.

I hate the volume of work I'm needing to do right now. I hate the situation that is leading to the volume of work I'm needing to do right now. I absolutely love dealing with a liaison who is, himself, a trained translator (though he prefers being an interpreter) and who actually has the skill set to recognize what I'm doing and appreciate it³.

It's growing dark as I approach the city, will in fact be pitch black by the time I get to a long mountain descent where my headlight keeps bouncing out of alignment. I'm a bit cranky on account of not having found anything meal shaped to eat since leaving the place where I spent last night, however, unlike an ordinary evening where I'm approaching a hotel 90 minutes after sunset, I haven't actually biked that much and I'm not all that tired.

It's hard to say if thats a good thing or a bad thing as it gave me plenty of energy for being a holy fucking terror to both the Front Desk and the police in response to "No Foreigners Allowed".

I pull out all the stops, from getting up close and yelling in the face of the person who tells me "no", to going behind the Front Desk and registering myself, to taking all the key cards and attempting to let myself into the room I assigned myself⁴, to straight up preventing them from checking any other customers⁵ in until I was checked in.

Then, because I'm not actually that big of an asshole, once I got checked in, I quietly sat in the lobby working on my laptop doing yet another emergency notice while waiting for someone from Epidemic Prevention and Control to show up and take a throat swab.

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¹ It's the nicest term I can come up with for describing a printed tile in the shower with a picture of an attractive woman, often partially undressed. 

² As someone whose professional foreign language name is kind of stupid and absolutely not the kind of name Chinese parents would give their daughter, I have absolutely no right to remark on the silliness of this particular movie star's English name, particularly when she's so well known by it that people in China don't use her rather ordinary Chinese name.

³ Part of his gratitude for my work comes directly from my actions meaning he doesn't have to do these jobs.

⁴ Usually, if they've labeled the keycards with room numbers, I don't need to do anything. Unfortunately, the card needed activating.

⁵ When I went up to the fifth floor to retrieve my laptop, I told the Front Desk "don't you dare think you can check anyone in while I'm gone". She was in the process of checking someone in when I came back, so I took his ID card out of her hand and threw it across the room like a frisbee. This made him very unhappy with me, however, as the police were already there by this point, he just joined in in the pasttime of "yelling at people" rather than whatever violence he may have wanted to do to me.