Sansa—my former employee—left my company in 2016. This was not only enough years ago for her to have forgotten much of the details of any "foreigners and hotels" drama, it was also long enough ago that I wasn't able¹ to book online before I showed up, and still had the habit of staying at the places on the cheapest end of the spectrum. As a result, even if she remembered clearly, it wasn't the level of issue that it is now.

The cheaper and grottier a place is, the more likely they are to take foreigners without complaint or hassle². It's the middle-class places where the front desk staff's income is completely divorced from my staying (or not staying) that they are so vehemently against being asked to deal with the bother of checking me in. However, as I grow older and have an increasing amount of disposable income, I not only don't want to carry my bike up stairs, I also want places that have actual mattresses, private bathrooms, and air conditioning.

She thought, by calling the mid-priced hotels in her neighborhood and asking them if I could stay, that she was doing the right thing. Instead—and particularly because it was quite late at night by the time she was calling—she effectively guaranteed that I couldn't stay at any of them.

Rather than force the issue or risk the possibility of a late night kerfuffle after I'd gotten a reasonable approximation of a warning that trouble was likely to happen, I told her not to worry and that I'd get myself a room near to where I already was on the industrial outskirts of town. I then pulled up Maps on my phone and, sorting by lowest price, picked the first place to not be listed as having a "communal bathroom".

Listed at 56y and discounted down to 49y because of how often I use the platform in question to book rooms, I got a call within five minutes of booking asking when I was coming cause the Front Desk wanted to go home for the night. The roughly thirty minutes I thought it would take was apparently much too long and my room key was left on a shelf underneath a small, fat Buddha statue.

Featuring a communal bathroom (despite not being listed as such) and having a hard wooden sleeping surface, it was easily the worst room I've stayed in in a very, very long time. On the basis of it being certain to leave me dirtier than I started, I couldn't even bring it upon myself to use the bathroom to take an attempt at a shower.

With the non-Sansa person I was due to meet with in Zibo being a mid-level official in Shandong provincial media that I met a few years ago during an event sponsored by the Hainan government³, I thusly got to shove in the face of all the people she dragged me around to meet and show off to that this is a Very Real Problem that has nothing to do with Covid or xenophobia and everything to do with a lack of training, a lack of knowledge, and a lack of a non-citizen resident ID card.

Whether this will stick with any of them in ways that will lead to useful Change should they have the opportunity to participate in making changes happen is highly questionable but at least—between my getting treated to expensive meals and characteristic local bbq—I got to horrify and embarrass them.

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¹ One notable exception to this being the yelling at the top of my lungs until the police got called episode in Kunming in 2014

² For certain values of hassle that pretend that successfully registering on the foreigner component of the Hotel Guest Registration System isn't a ballache

³ Although I do work for the media quite often, I make no pretense that my attendance at said event was as anything other than window dressing on account of them being unable to get any foreign media to attend and needing "unlikely to embarrass them" foreigners who could look like we might be media to show up in the background of photos and the like.