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Hotel #1 is not at all nice. The rooms themselves aren't so bad but the public toilets at the end of the hall are not really something I want to tolerate in the 55 元 a night price range and definitely not something to expose China newbs to. Also, I'm kind of skeeved by the likely cleanliness non-level because, when taken to look at a room with a shower, the ayi lets us know we only need to go use the public toilets for pooping, but, there's not actually a toilet of any kind in the bathroom. Just a floor. That drains into a pipe running along the hall.

Hotel #2 is big enough that they've got their prices listed online. 128元 a night for a room. It's rather a lot for the general vicinity but, if needs must, we can certainly consider it. As today is a Friday night and the entrance to the karaoke place that's part of the hotel is almost as large as the entrance to the hotel part of the hotel part, I'm hoping that we won't have to go to Hotel #2 as we continue on to take a look at #3.

At 80元 a night per room, Hotel #3 has both an elevator and sit down flush toilets. It's also got a hotel clerk who thinks foreigners aren't allowed to stay and local police who—despite my going aggressively Full Bitch less than 15 minutes in—take over 90 minutes of my raising hell to show up from the police station... ...50 meters away.

As a general rule, when I'm acting like a toddler having a full blown temper tantrum melt down, it's an act. At least, that's what I tell myself. That I'm not actually a horrid person who flies off the handle simply because people won't do what I want them to do. It's just an act. Only an act. I'm doing it this way because it's more effective than being polite. That's why.

With Ivan and Catalina there to watch me go thermonuclear I discovered, the screaming, the bellowing, the raging, the annoyingly touching other people's belongings, the getting in the way, the not taking no for an answer, it's not just what I tell myself. It's actually an act.

Realizing that I couldn't leave them to watch me explode like a not particularly polite volcano without at least a little bit of information about what the hell was going on, episodes of my being a loud, pushy, rude twat were interspersed with relatively calm English language descriptions, translations, and stories. Whether I was playing keep away with the front desk woman's cell phone (which she was insisting on trying to watch videos on instead of talking to me) or straight up taking room keys off the front desk without permission and giving them to the Argentinians to go see if they liked 'our' rooms, there is absolutely no question that I was the living embodiment of Disorderly Conduct.

(One of the two rooms we ended up in was actually one of 'our' rooms from the stolen room key mini-episode. The other one was actually someone else's room that already had his stuff in it.)

But the police just wouldn't cooperate. They wouldn't agree to tell the front desk lady over the phone to just let us stay; they wouldn't agree to look for a Temporary Residence Registration Form for Foreigners on the Public Security Intranet; and, they wouldn't show up. At least, not until I started preventing other customers who walked in after us from checking in. Then, they finally showed up. Then, we finally got checked in. Then, showering and dinner became an actual possibility.

It wasn't until we got back from dinner (which was about as completely opposite in their reaction to having foreigners in their restaurant as was humanly possible) that I saw the sign on the corner pointing to the police station; that I discovered I could stick my head out the window of my hotel room and—if the wind was in my favor—land a spit ball on one of the police cars