Eight years ago, I was drunkenly playing board games with two of my best friends when one of them got a panicked call for help from a lovely American lady who, along with her husband, was only about four months into being a teacher in Haikou, and who was having one of the worst weeks of her life. Shortly thereafter my two friends and I ended up at the local hospital running interference and finding out all kinds of wonderful juicy stuff like their employer not having actually bought the medical insurance that was in their contract.

Things were already getting nasty and they only got nastier but, by 9am the next morning, with the help of a lawyer, they were on a plane back to the US and their now former employer had two less English teachers.

The former employer did not appreciate my besmirching her good name by posting a write-up of what happened on ESL Watch, the TEFLChina List, and Dave's ESL Cafe. It didn't matter that everything I wrote was true, it merely mattered that I had written it. It was bad enough that my actions (i.e. calling a lawyer at 11 o'clock at night) had already caused her to lose two teachers. Now I was going to make it difficult for her to get more teachers? Perhaps a week after the postings went online, after she had gotten nowhere threatening all the places I posted the story, I got a piece of certified mail with a Cease and Desist Letter.

I wasn't just angry, I was furious. But, at the same time, in the middle of my seething anger that this horrid woman had had the audacity to send me a Cease and Desist Letter, I found myself thinking of it like the Baby's First Milestones in more normal families with "My Mom is going to be so proud of me."

Today, I did another thing that would make my Mom proud.

I convinced the police to engage in civil disobedience.

According to Chinese law, everyone who stays in a hotel (of any kind) must register the day that they stay. This even includes people who are only renting the room for a 3-hour block. (The afternoon nap is a sacred thing for many Chinese people and it's perfectly normal for hotels that are not 'no-tells' to have short term rooms available.)

Also according to Chinese law, instead of the usual 24 hours for urban areas, when a foreigner stays at a private residence in a non-urban area, they must register within 72 hours.

So, after many many hours at the police station (including a second dinner in the police station canteen) with them trying really really hard to get the situation settled and the higher ups at the county level either not cooperating with them, straight up not answering the phone when someone else bounced them back to this person, or flat out telling them that it was impossible, they decided that a) I should stay in some random person's private home and b) they should tell the higher-ups that this was what I was going to do.

This had the desired effect.
My hotel tonight is very nice.

The actual riding part of the day was entirely on a National Road. It wasn't quite as badly truck infested as I'd feared after the short stint last night coming off of the unfinished expressway but it was still a National Road and a relatively recently repaved and widened one at that so it wasn't especially interesting as these things go.

The only detour I did all day was to check out a fort with rammed earth walls about 500 meters away from the road. I slid down the embankment, walked across a date orchard, spent the whole time at the fort worrying about my bike and my stuff, and then, only after I got back on my bike, that's when I found the access road. 

For one of the long flatter sections that went through cultivated areas with harvested fields apparently made out of gravel, I also put a podcast on.

Got into town a little past 4pm, had a nice leisurely dunch to make sure that I was thoroughly well rested and well fed and not the slightest bit inclined towards bitchiness when I started my—now daily—altercation with the authorities.

I seem to be the first foreigner they've had stay in town and, just like the police in Qinghu Town in Guangxi in 2008, they were really trying to do everything right while also having no blipping idea how it was supposed to be done. They were really nice and really friendly and really running headlong into a concrete wall with the people above them who should have been telling them how to do it from the Public Security Intranet but who weren't because they just weren't. (I want to say that those people also didn't know and didn't have the balls to admit that they didn't know but I really don't know what the reason was.) 

By that point, however, enough stuff had been gracefully and appropriately dropped into conversation about the sort of clients I translate for that the police were super duper uninclined towards pissing me off.

At one point, in the sea of mostly unintelligible local dialect being spoken on the phone (before they realized I was trying to listen and made a point of no longer having phone conversations where I could overhear them) I caught "yes, we offered to drive her somewhere else. No, she doesn't want to go somewhere else. No, we can't make her. She does work for the central government." 

The plan for tomorrow is to start the day by printing off a handful of copies of the Temporary Residence Registration Form for Foreigners that I already have. For tomorrow's altercation, I will approach from the perspective of "the registration system is currently broken and no one knows why" which is close enough to the truth of "it's currently disabled and no one who knows why is saying why" that it's practically true.