I suppose today's excitement must be that I've crossed the Yangtze River. As the last time I was ferried across it (all the way back in 2017!) it was heavily swollen by autumn's floods, it wasn't nearly as exciting as I thought crossing the Yangtze ought to be. I had a lot of fun making the video though.

Another candidate for excitement is the delicate navigation of a wire transfer from a very security oriented credit union with the most delightful habit of apparently making up random security questions on the basis of the kind of info one's bank has about them. Long since invalidated by my having previously written about it somewhere semi-public, my favorite still remains the time that they accepted "near the statue with the shiny boobs" as a valid response to "which of our branches did you open your account at?' Compare this to, well, everything about banking in China¹ and, frustrated though I may be by these extra hoops to jump through, I wouldn't trade them away for anything.

Last but not least comes the discovery that my hotel owner and I apparently have people in common. Now, why exactly a guy who drives a Mercedes and owns a seafront apartment in Haikou also owns a small, budget hotel on the rural edge of nowheresville is one of those questions that isn't really easy to answer other than it probably being an existing family business before he got rich and no one sees much of any reason to stop as funds like he has could always up and vanish but a good, solid business won't.

In any case, he's got an apartment in Haikou only 5 or 6km away from where I live and I'm locally a bit infamous, so of course he knows people that I know and that know me.

After having gotten up quite late (on account of the US time zone banking), I lollygagged away a good hour of the morning talking with him 

It's a gray and dreary day so, despite calling ahead and being told that the Naval Shipyard Museum allows foreigners, I decide to skip that detour altogether for hour upon hour of the traffic lights and protected bike lanes of a city that never quite materializes as I move from the far outskirts of one conurbation to the far outskirts of the next without actually going downtown.

Downtown will, of course, happen. After dark. When the mizzle has turned to drizzle and I'm on my fourth unsuccessful booking of the evening for reasons that seem to be more because I'm trying to get a cheap room tham anything related to my being a foreigner. At the very least, the third hotel to not confirm was given a booking in my Chinese name².

Four is willing to accept me³. But four has stairs to a third floor lobby and I'm not cool with that.

Five is an American brand⁴ where I sweet talk my way behind the counter to help out and have just started to get my information entered when a pack⁵ of quite non-sober elderly men descend upon the lobby in a refusal to believe that not everyone behind the front desk is an employee or that their registrations can't be processed just yet because I'm still doing my own.

Between the work of convincing them to stop talking at or to me, and responding again that I am aware that I have striking blue eyes just like a husky dog, and getting my info entered, I suddenly have a phone thrust into my hand by the actual Front Desk lady who has given up on talking to the police herself in favor of handling all the other customers. And it wasn't even like they were unfriendly or anything like that, just that I really didn't have the available spoons⁶ to add "answering questions in Chinese over the phone" to my workload.

But I eventually get checked in, and the guy who appeared from nowhere to hand me my keycard not only helped me with getting to the elevator without being bothered (too much) by the old guys, be also let me know before I opened it to what surely would have been searing disappointment that the individually wrapped biscuit with Korean writing I nabbed from the candy dish on the counter was actually a bar of soap.

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¹ Be that as it may, my best "banking in China" story involves the surprisingly incompetent finance department of a Swedish multinational and their charming inability to include all the letters of my name in the order which I provided them.

² Hotels one and two timed out and auto-refunded. Hotel three hadn't confirmed by the time I got out front and called them only to be told that they were out of that room type and had already said "no" to the OTA fifteen minutes earlier.

³ With an English name, but also with a huge amount of fuss because they really really really wanted me to simultaneously book and sign up for their awards program and my lack of a valid Chinese ID number kept breaking the awards program registration and cancelling my reservation in progress.

⁴ Not that this has any relationship to staff agreeing or refusing to take foreigners

⁵ "Pack" sounds like wolf pack and might not be the right word. Given the way they garrously filled all available space, "flock" or "herd" would perhaps be more appropriate.

⁶ Originally coming from the chronic disability community, "spoons" or "to have spoons" refers to the total combined amount of mental and physical energy you currently have and whether the expenditure of that mental or physical energy will affect your future energy levels.