It stands to reason—even if we don't touch on things like my wanghong status on Douyin or the reach I've got in Hainan with the big Foreigners' WeChat Groups¹—if I'm staying with the senior manager of a restaurant chain in an apartment owned by the chain's GM, I am probably going to eat there as well.

Via a confusing tangle of roads and subways that I'm not awake or alert enough to be both tagging along after someone else and able to easily and effectively backtrack on my own, Aaron and I head to the newest of their restaurants in a mall somewhere underneath the offices of the Danish Consulate.

Smashed avocado and charred cherry tomato pasta, an IPA, a cappuccino, and a chocolate tart later, I pull out my laptop to work on documents for the Haikou Foreign Affairs Office until it's time for me to head to another branch of the restaurant for dinner and drinks with the Voice of the Guangzhou Metro.

Then, because the apartment is in one of the few areas of Guangzhou that I've been in many times (as far back as 2004), I actually manage to find my way almost all the way back before needing the location pin sent to me.

¹ 1,934 people in five groups