After finishing yesterday’s blog, I laid out my plans for the day, to wander around one of the districts not far from here and simply take in the sights and sounds. It was also 2 pm at that point, so lunch was on the menu as I prepared my treasure-hunting gear. I took the elevator downstairs and left the hotel, then immediately realized that I had forgotten to do something back in my room, so I went back into the hotel. As the elevator doors opened, I started a surprise as a little wheeled robot came gliding out of the elevator with no one else in it. I took a picture of it rolling off towards the front desk:

And then one more later on of it parked by the desk, looking all innocent-like:

Technology, right? I believe I read somewhere that it delivers some stuff to hotel doors for room service or something, but I never saw it in action until now. Anyway I got back up to my room, did what I had to do, then came down again and took a Didi to my neighbourhood for the day. I specifically used a promising-looking mall named City Plaza as my drop-off spot, and headed right upstairs for lunch.

I ended up collecting a few more menu brochures from there anyway, but for once I wasn’t really stuck in indecision and pretty much decided on my lunch the moment I saw the store (and its menu) — I ate at a store named Zhaochengshi (赵诚实), which for some reason has close to zero internet presence that I could find. But my goodness, that Signature Scallion Oil Zhanjiang Chicken (half) that I had there was quite possibly the best meal of my trip so far. The chicken, drenched in the onion and sauce mixture, was so delicious that it didn’t need (and there weren’t any anyway) any condiments. The chicken was 59 yuan, and I had it with a bowl of yellow “chicken oil rice” for 3 yuan more (and there was a flask of tea which thankfully this time wasn’t monkfruit tea). This added another 3 yuan gratuity charge, so it turned out to be 65 yuan in total, exactly the same as yesterday’s dinner cost. It came to $12.97 CAD instead of $13.03 this time though, as apparently the Canadian dollar has strengthened (or the yuan weakened) over the $1 CAD for 5 yuan line again after yesterday.

I was also impressed that to keep the chicken lukewarm, they put it on a second bowl with a little candle burning inside of it:

Huh, that was kind of neat. Never seen a place to that. The candle was still gently burning its life away when I was done my meal. There were also large flasks of.. wine? on the side.

I didn’t try them and I’m not sure if they were free or not, and actually I’m not sure if they were actually meant to be some sort of condiment or something, but… wolfberry and red date wine? Black maca and goji berry wine? Deer tendon and ginseng wine? What? There weren’t many people in the restaurant though and no one else came by to partake from it, and the way I do things when I am unsure is I watch others to see what they do and what can be done, before potentially doing it myself, so since no one else touched it in the end, I didn’t either.

I walked around the rest of City Plaza after the meal. Here are some highlights from that walk. This fish tank was notable to me because Zhanjiang is a seafood port and I had seen some seafood places with fish tanks and live fish in them that were probably turned into fresh meals. This one though…. the signs just talk about chickens (鸡) so in this specific case those fish in the tank might actually, for once, be decorative!

Here’s a sign that went “Happy new yeae!” It was a huge sign too. Asian jank.

“Accessories, who you wamt to be!” Please understand what you are writing in a foreign language.

Two separate arcade areas out of possibly half a dozen I saw today:

And this weird pachinko machine setup at the side of a walkway near some escalators. I could not figure out what was going on at first:

But from what I understood after watching and Google Translating for a few minutes, there’s a prize machine with stuff you can get using tickets:

Another machine you can buy pachinko balls from:

The balls go into the machines and you get prize tickets (and some balls) back from them, and apparently you can get bonus tickets from using certain number thresholds of balls at once or by buying balls once per day or something, like a daily gacha mechanic brought to the real world. How weird. Then you bring the prize ticket to this redemption booth to collect your items.

Definitely not something I’ve seen in the western world, or even in Japan, yet. Although i haven’t really checked out a pachinko parlour there so I don’t really know how it works. Maybe I should. Anyway, there was also a supermarket in the basement, so that naturally drew me to it. I was not ready to see a Walmart, of all things, being the supermarket of choice in this mall though.

I spent way too long in here walking around. It was a bit larger than the previous ones but was pretty much the same — some stalls selling specific things on the outsides, and then large sections selling household goods, non-perishable food, fresh groceries and meat, and so on.

I might be wrong, but I feel like I saw a lot more of the XX.99 yuan pricing here for items, whereas in the past supermarkets that I went to, I saw them just do it to one decimal places, XX.9 yuan.

What also surprised me was that there was a large deli area here too.

Mmm, yum yum. Too bad I was already full (and there was nowhere for me to sit down and eat it anyway). Wait, what the heck are these:

The item to the right of the weird pasta intrigued me for a bit, and one of those AI-assisted Google Lens searches tells me that it’s raw fish skin. By the by, I do very much like the new phone feature on my Samsung where I can point my camera at something so that it’s on screen, then press and hold the home button on my phone to bring up a UI where I can select something on the phone screen for identification or translation through Google’s services. Or I can select text to copy to the clipboard, even in other languages, using OCR tools. Very, very convenient.

Moving on, there was a rack of dried and preserved sausages that also intrigued me and reminded me of food preservation in a computer game.

And racks of dried cuttlefish and squid that smelled heavenly to me:

And many other things I didn’t photograph or didn’t care to share. I was kind of looking for some local teas that Gemini had suggested but I didn’t really find it here either, though I did find a larger tea section here than in the previous Lotus supermarket. Part of the reason I spent so much time here too was that it was raining outside:

It was pouring rain and windy at first, so I didn’t really want to use my umbrella either as it’s a little fragile and small due to being a compact fold-up one, but after it subsided a little bit I pulled it out anyway and started walking.

Because it was a weekend, one of the things that struck me as I walked around were how many children and teens there were hanging out at their parents’ or friend’s or community shops or whatever, even in the rain. It was neat to see just a random stationery shop like this one, for example, and half a dozen of them just standing around. I think a couple of them were actually inside the shop, and thus not pictured here.

This neighbourhood was called Xiashan, and specifically I was around an area called the Xiashan Pedestrian Street, which seems like it had shops and stalls catering to people wandering by on a nice, wide, well-maintained street with not a ton of motorcycles around for once. Except that, well, because it was raining, many of those stalls were abandoned. That also meant that it felt a little liminal walking around here though, as the rain turned into a drizzle and then stopped, and then started to pour again, and then stopped again, and so on. There was a nice, cool breeze and I liked this area as it was being rained on very much.

I love all the reflections that the puddles of water created, too. And hey, here’s another of those horses with a handprint on its bum.

A lot of the street was also dolled up for Chinese New Year festivities, with stuff like this (taken with the camera pulled back to contrast with the buildings behind):

And these trees, lanterns in trees with those fluttering tails are gorgeous:

And stuff like this:

I saw a board that someone else had written 我爱你们中国人, or “I love you, Chinese people” on. How weird. I feel that it’s rare to see any sort of vandalism in China.

I came to the end of the street and crossed on from there, just letting my feet wander wherever. I saw a weird sign at a road crossing specifically saying that pets were not allowed here:

Clutching Tigey and dodging legions of motorcycles and scooters going by, I hurried across anyway and turned right and ended up at a quiet park.

Hm… “Talk About Civilization“? Wha? I don’t think that quite says what you think it says.

From the park, I saw a mall that looked intriguing to me, so I went in this direction.

From the signage outside and inside, it was called I-Fortune Mall. On Amap, they call it Yifu International. Yi for the I, and Fu for 福, which means fortune, I guess. I stepped in from the rain, and was immediately greeted with this sight.

I guess you know a mall is largely unoccupied when kids are crawling around on the ground as part of their fun and games, huh. I immediately turned around and walked out.. no I didn’t. I love liminal malls, so that pulled me in.

This mall for whatever reason was dolphin themed, and there were lots of symbols and drawings and stuff of dolphins along the walls, and an exhibition commemorating a World Dolphin Day or something from the past. The mall itself seemed to have two mascot characters, the blue and pink dolphins on the right here:

The blue one is saying “I am the younger brother, Xiao Haoqi” and the pink one is saying “I am the elder sister, Xiao Qibao”. Cute. In the background to the left, there was a photo op area that I promptly posed Tigey for.

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This one says “I am in Zhanjiang, and I miss you.” Poignant, yet at the same time I couldn’t help but read it as “I am in Zhanjiang, and I want to go home because i miss you” rather than what they probably intended, which was something closer to “I am in Zhanjiang, and I wish you were here too.” Heh.

I went down to explore the basement next, and had a surprise because there were a bunch of anime-focused shops down there, in particular this one:

I went inside but found nothing I wanted. Nice Bocchi the Rock! cardboard cutout here though.

Next to it was a row of gashapon machines, and a small basket for opened, discarded capsules. I poked around in there hoping to find some of those booklets, which I did not, but instead I found this piece of treasure:

I thought it was a.. phone card or something at first, despite the ACA24 (Zhanjiang) Nijigen Anime Show line at the top, because it certainly felt like one since it was an actual stiff card instead of a paper or cardboard thing. I thought maybe it was a commemorative one bought at the end. However, I put it to Gemini anyway, and after analysis of the photos of its front and back, Gemini suggested that it was actually an entry card for the event which took place here five years ago. A very hyper-local anime event that took place a long time ago, and cool art to boot. What was this card doing in that basket for discarded capsules? Who knows. It had a little bit of some glue-like substance on the front, so I stuffed it into a ziploc bag that I had and brought it back to the hotel to give it a good soak in warm water and soap later on. I almost never loot random things “off the ground”, but since this was in a box that I was going through anyway, it was probably fine. This was my prize catch of the day!

Sauntering off, I peeked around the basement, seeing things like whatever this was. I have no idea, since “Magic Quadratic Element” resolves to nothing at all on Google and 动漫星城 didn’t seem to turn out anything specifically useful either except a mall in Guangzhou that I’ve actually been to before. Also check out that little sad statue in the corner.

I also peeked into a few other shops, like this place where people were playing some TCG in, but I didn’t enter them.

Instead, I had noticed that the escalators up from the second to the third floor were not working, but that there were people taking the elevator to the fifth floor anyway, which the directory listed as being a cinema. So I went up there with them. Indeed, there was a cinema there.

It was mostly deserted, but there were a couple of tables on the left with tablets on them with a nice view of the city below, and a couple people sitting at said tables.

But there was also an arcade up here, which I believe was not listed, or else I completely missed seeing it.

And also a billiards room:

And also this.. roller skating rink? With two marquee signboards with Chinese text that was scrolling by really quickly. I’m surprised the camera could capture this at all.

And also this dilapidated, broken down shop right next to the rink and the escalator going down to the fourth floor. What a mix of tenants up here.

The fourth floor was something else too. There was a bright central area:

And then passages going off in all directions in weird, non-cardinal ways, slicing the area up into some weird honeycomb-like shape with little independent shops everywhere.

Joy this sweeter!

I really, really enjoyed walking around this maze. This is the sort of strata mall nonsense I live for. Tiny shops everywhere trying their best. I wonder how they survive without much foot traffic. There were people there, just not that many. Here’s a peek into some shops, starting with a manicure place with lots of customers:

Someone lounging on a chair outside between two stalls at an irregular 3-4 way intersection:

A video arcade store with lots of kids playing on consoles there, and oh, they’re also broadcasting their Wi-Fi password to the world…

A tattoo parlour, but everyone inside is playing cards…

Oops, I was seen. I skedaddled out of there to the elevator leading down to the third floor. I was still on the fourth floor at this point, and a lot of the “inner” shops in the maze of corridors were occupied, but there were a bunch of the outer ones that were not. And then there were these ones, by the escalator I used, that were not really even shops at all.

The third level was a lot less fun, and only consisted of a few shops and a large cordoned off section, although there was this statue, similar to the one at the Magic Quadratic sign earlier:

Why were they so sad? I had no idea what they were, so I showed a picture of it to Gemini, who promptly told me that this was a character from an American artist named KAWS, called Companion, which was extremely popular in China. Also, while a little derivative, it’s also basically considered a bootleg Mickey Mouse icon here, or at least part of the reason why people like that aesthetic. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it in more upscale malls too, and they’re meant to be there for charming photo ops and such and isn’t actually supposed to carry such a look of depression, but the setting here certainly makes it look so!

There was also a noteboard of sticky notes here, but I realized after taking a one-shot picture of it that the notes couldn’t actually be read, whereas some of them were actually quite charming to me, so I retook a two-shot (left and right half) photo of it instead for preservation.

And finally, this was the cordoned off area on the third floor. Looks like some sort of event had happened there.

The escalators between the 2nd and 3rd, 3rd and 4th, and 4th and 5th floor were all non-operational, up and down both ways, which I found to be so weird. So much for supporting your upper level businesses, huh.

From here, I left the mall as it had ceased to rain, and saw some interesting looking malls diagonally across the street from this one, so I waited to cross the road, eyeing the horde of motorcycles here. According to Amap, there was a large, ovallish road loop here the size of two city blocks between Renmin West 4th/5th Road and Renmin South Avenue that several other roads fed into, so it seemed like it would be a busy part of the city vehicle-wise, and it sure looked that way.

There was a small 7-Eleven booth by the side of the road too, the first one of the international convenience stores that I’d seen in China this trip.

I only stopped by inside briefly to peek around, but I did recognize this brand of instant noodles from my previous trip to China. I wondered about picking up some instant noodles to try, especially since I skip breakfast almost every day due to work and my blog, but I haven’t quite bitten yet.

Cutting between buildings, I saw a road leading behind the glitzy street-facing malls and neon signs to some housing areas behind it, and was struck by how bleak and normal in comparison it looked. This was literally one building behind the shiny neon malls that were to my right and back.

Malls that looked like this one, Guomao Tower, which I eventually entered next. It’s labelled as International Trade Mansion on Amap.

I entered through this side entrance that led into a convenience store though, since I wanted to peek around in there too, and this cute little “corn-flavoured sausage” thing caught my eye. Apparently they’re called Shimingtang (食名堂).

Don’t you just want to take one home? No? Well I didn’t either.

I went into the mall to look around. It was a three storey affair, with lots of fancy clothing and apparel stores on the first two levels that I’d never heard of as always, and a kids area on the third floor.

I liked these steps where people could sit on, and there was a large TV overhead showing some cartoon.

There was also yet another arcade:

And something I didn’t understand but looked like an art tutoring area or something, so I ignored this at first. I eventually would loop back around to this from a totally unexpected direction though.

What started that whole catalyst off was that even though the mall was only a three level mall, I saw a weird escalator going up into a yawning abyss, and this man climbing up it, even though the escalator was turned off.

Never mind turned off, the escalator was so dilapidated that there were holes in it and I wasn’t completely sure it was safe to climb. It was, for now, though. But how does an escalator get this run-down?

Anyway, this led to a hidden fourth level of shops that looked to be almost all completely shuttered or at least one of those where you had to know the owner directly for. All little holes in the wall, right on top of that glitzy REIT mall below.

There were more on the fifth floor as well, though I never went up there, and only took a picture of the stairs going up:

I skipped going up there because I was a little spooked by how quiet and different the area was, and was going to go back downstairs, but then I heard someone step out of one of the half-open shops behind me, making cute little beckoning noises as though trying to attract a cat. He looked at me, I looked at him, then he stepped out through this doorway instead. A few moments later, he stepped in, declared that he had no idea where the thing he was looking for had run off to, and went back into his shop. Intrigued, I stepped out of that doorway, pictured below, instead of going back downstairs to civilization, and found this.

Wowww, I was on a rooftop, but not in the traditional sense, this was a 4th storey rooftop that was also the “ground level” of a bunch of very intimate residential buildings here, and had no actual access to the “edge” of the roof that I saw, as it was all apartment buildings going way up. Some of the apartment doors were on this level itself too, directly accessible from this rooftop, since it was basically the ground level of the apartment. A food delivery person scuttled by, as did a couple of other residents, and they all got into an elevator headed down, But it was too cramped and I didn’t want to get in with them, especially since they were all guys too, so I instead took this seedy staircase down.

There were no public access doorways between the fourth and the ground level here, so I went all the way down and eventually ended up here:

Freedom! I was out onto the streets again, and I also realized at this point (from the second picture above) that I was actually really close to the City Plaza mall that I had started the day in, it was just across the road. See that Walmart sign up there. I had gone in to the right, between that building and the white one next to it, and made a clockwise loop around the area to end back up here.

I also discovered at this point that there were two Guomao Tower buildings, and I was now staring at the second one, which said “Zhanjiang Good Eats Road”. It apparently actually officially translates to Zhanjiang Food Street, but I prefer my version. Anyway, the outside looked like this:

And the inside like this:

Hey, wait a minute, this store isn’t Linlee, why does it have rubber ducks too?

Nice neon branding for the entire food street, I like it:

I spent an hour here walking up and down the two levels, the bottom level was styled like a food court area with standalone booths in the center and smaller eateries on the outside, and the top level contained fully-fledged restaurants. Oddly, unlike Paradise Walk and City Plaza, only one of them actually gave me any of those menu pamphlets, which made me a little sad.

I was crushed by indecision here again though as to what to eat, since I do feel some pressure when I visit a place to try something local, since I’m only here for a couple of days. While wandering, I also accidentally found an escalator to a third level, which had a very quiet bookshop-cafe thing that seemed to mostly sell tuition stuff, like worksheets and practice and review books, rather than normal books. It also had a cafe where you could sit at, but only if you spent at least 10 yuan in the shop. A couple of boys were seated there at their own tables, studiously working on either homework or some sort of practice material. It was interesting. A bookstore but only selling revision materials? On the third floor of a mall that otherwise basically only really had food stores?

Walking to the other side of the passage there though, I walked through what looked like a small warehouse-like area, and then, much to my surprise, ended up at that art tutoring area that I had talked about earlier with the yellow balloons, on the third floor of the other building. Apparently what I thought was a passage to the back rooms of the shop was actually a passage to the weird bookshop and the other tower.

By this time I had actually scanned one of the QR codes on a random table on the second floor of the food mall and found that I could use that to get a listing of all the shops in the court, ranked by popularity (how many sales they had made that day), and I could also access a lot of their food menus from there. That was much easier than walking in circles trying to decipher menus and figure out what was local, so I sat down on that resting area where the red trees were, half-watching the cartoon on the large TV overhead as I rested. It featured boys wearing lion dance outfits of different colours competing in some competition that involved parkouring up poles and then having a red vs blue martial arts style battle at the very top pole to try to claim a prize ball there.

While I was indulging myself, what I did was take screenshots of the shop listings and feed them one at a time to Gemini instead. So like pages 1 and 2 looked like this, for example.

It analyzed the screenshots and told me what the stores were, whether they were local stores or national chains (the latter of which I was trying to avoid, and it knew that), and what kind of cuisine it had. I went through seven pages of that as my phone charged, then out of the top candidates for local stores, I fed it a couple of pages of their menus as well.

In the end, I ended up choosing a store named Chaojiang Niurou Guotiao, and eating their Guotiao with fresh beef, beef meatballs, beef brisket, extra radish, and extra cabbage, for 30 CNY ($5.99 CAD).

“Wait for your long time”, the sign said. The Chinese words more closely read “We’ve been waiting for you” though. Did I mention yet that almost no one in Haikou or Zhanjiang speaks any English at all, maybe just one or two words at most, despite there actually being a fair number of English signs and such around? It’s so weird.

The meal itself was fine. The beef was nice, the noodles were supposed to be the highlight and Gemini had painted it as some sort of hor fun-like noodle except the starch was used differently and it was meant to be easily broken when chewed on or something but really it was just noodles. It was decent, but nothing was beating the lunch that I had.

Gemini had also been very enthusiastic about a certain pastry shop called Golden Bauhinia that it had seen in the screenshots, and when I got to the shop after dinner they were closing down for the night but also had these things on their counter:

I used Gemini to translate them and suggest a couple, and while it got one of the translations wrong and a couple of the transcribed characters wrong, it did do a pretty good job of it overall. I ended up partly ignoring Gemini anyway and bought four different ones:

Before taking a cab home for the evening. I booked a Didi before realizing that I should have done it from across the road because that would mean it didn’t need to do two additional turns to get me home since the direction my hotel was in was against the flow of traffic of the road just in front of me. Thankfuly, the app did allow me to change my pickup point, and the guy was still dropping off a previous passenger at the time, so I modified the meeting location, crossed the street to wait for him, and took a picture of what the Guomao Towers looked like from afar.

Shiny. There was a shiny tree next to me too, outside of City Plaza:

Chinese New Year decorations are amazing for my soul. I got back home safely, had a shower, then watched some weird but enthralling TV cartoon (called Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, it turns out) while cataloguing and eating the little sticky dumplings. This involved transcribing all the characters by hand and then feeding them to Gemini, and they turned out to be:

5 yuan — Soy Milk & Coconut (豆乳椰椰)
4 yuan — Peanut Mugwort Cake (花生艾饼)
4 yuan — Taro Paste White He (芋泥白籺)
4 yuan — Meat Floss Qingtuan (肉松青团)

The coconut in the first one was nice, the second peanut cake was nice too, the third one was far too earthy/herbal for my liking, and the fourth one tasted a lot less savoury than I had expected. I had trouble writing out one of the characters in that list though, the 籺 one, because Google handwriting refused to understand it and give it to me as an option even though I could clearly see that that was the correct character. In the end, I used the OCR capture tool from the Samsung phone’s home button version of Google Lens/Translate, and used that to select the text to search for, and that finally produced the character for me.

This is interesting because when I fed it to Gemini, it pounced on that 籺 character and called it “a linguistic fossil of the local Yue and Hakka cultures in the area”, pointing out that that was such a super regional character, used only in western Guangdong and a couple of other nearby places, whereas most of the rest of China uses the far more common bao (包) or gao (糕) instead. I wasn’t sure if it was hallucinating but Chinese Wikipedia seemed to back it up. Well, the regional fossil part at least, I didn’t check the Yue/Hakka bit nor have any idea how to do so. But that was neat. I also really enjoy food history! And this sort of local context (when Gemini‘s not hallucinating yet again) is the sort of spice that I love sprinkled on my wanderings around a foreign land.