This blog post was delayed because I got sick at the end of the day, although I’ll move the details of that to the Day 25 post.

I had a pretty good and detailed dream last night, but I just couldn’t pull it together in my memory and this bugged me all day. I remember it had to do with swapping roles or something with other people in a group, and with some Chinese characters involving the word 别 at some point, but what was the actual dream about? I couldn’t remember enough to even produce a snippet. Very disappointing.

Also, I largely like this room that I’ve been assigned but there’s one huge flaw with it, which is that it’s one of those rooms where I have to use my door keycard to also activate power in the apartment by slipping the card into a power slot when I’m in the apartment itself. That’s all well and good, a fair number of hotels do that. But for some reason, the actual keycard slot is not by the door like most other places, but across the living room next to the kitchen, so I actually have to close the front door, then navigate my way through the darkness to where the keycard is, and then insert the keycard in (or touch it to the outside of the wall holder) to actually activate the lights in the apartment. Also for some reason the video projector is in the living room instead of the bedroom and there’s no living room light where the projector is. So weird.

My day started pretty late in the afternoon due to work and the blog, and it was almost 3pm before I ventured out. Nothing of note happened earlier on in the day except for a nice bowl of instant noodles for brunch.

The reflections of the overhead lights on the shiny table make it seem as though that dish has a kira kira effect, doesn’t it?

My first goal of the afternoon was a nearby museum called the Jiangmen Wuyi Museum of Overseas Chinese. That museum’s located right smack in the middle of Jiangmen’s commercial area, only slightly further from my hotel than that Wanda Plaza (see yesterday’s neon-lit night time city skyline screenshot) is. It’s on the city block just adjacent to where my hotel is, to the right. in fact, you can see my building in this picture, it’s the tall one that the red China flag is overlapping.

And the museum itself is just behind me, with Wanda Plaza on my right. But where am I? Apparently there’s a Coffee Culture Festival of some sort happening here in two days, March 05, and it runs until Mar 08. That should be fun?

There was also.. something, set up across the road, in the field in front of the Wanda Plaza. From what I could tell, this was called the Jiangmen Premium Foreign Trade Products Promotion. It looked like a festival but probably wasn’t one in the food and beverages sense of the word, so I didn’t go there.

Anyway, the museum beckoned. Apparently it’s also called the China Qiaodu Museum of Overseas Chinese.

The theme of this museum was basically that a lot of overseas Chinese came from Jiangmen, and surrounding areas like Taishan and elsewhere in Guangzhou. It also gave a nod to other places like Fujian that also produced a lot of overseas Chinese. It then went on to talk about the sacrifices that many of them made, for example fighting for other countries or coming back to China to fight in the world wars, in helping build Canada and the USA’s cross-continental railways and various infrastructure in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and more. It was a really cool museum, and the one part of the museum that listed a number of those that had died in the world wars was particularly touching.

As you can see, a lot of it had English translations too, although it was far from perfect. They did try though, so kudos for that.

This Chinese-English dictionary also made me boggle. Some of the phrases they picked to translate… It also took me a while to realize that the complicated script by each entry was an attempt at a transliteration of the English word using Chinese characters. Huh.

And here’s a nice, if fictitious Chinatown set in a section of the museum that talked about Chinatowns around the world.

I did like the museum, though as I started late I had to pretty much rush through the end sections. As I wanted to get to the gift shop. There were actually quite a few cool items there, and I ended up picking up not one, but two new plushies for Tigey‘s army, as well as a food-themed fridge magnet:

Oddly, when I brought these items to the cashier, I was speaking Chinese, but she conducted the transaction in fluent English instead. She’s the first and only person to do so on this trip to China so far. Then a security guard came by to yell at everyone that the musum was closing, and she yelled back in Chinese to wait a while since she was helping a customer. Then back to me, in English. I realized afterwards that it was probably because I was wearing a University of Alberta shirt.

Anyhow, one of the plushies is a “persimmon money tree” while the other one is a pegasus standing on a block that says “No. 1”. Oh and the pegasus can be detached from the block since it’s attached via velcro. They’re both amazing. The pegasus cost 48 yuan ($9.57 CAD) and the tree cost 38 ($7.57 CAD).

The musem was close enough to my home base that I returned long enough to dump the plushies off before setting off again. For the evening, I wanted to visit a mall further afield, so I took a Didi to one called Pengjiang Xingfuli. Gemini had been pretty adamant that there was a really neat mall called the Yihua Department Store that I should visit, and that was where some stray map markers hinting at that name pointed to, plus there was obviously a mall of some sort there, so that’s where I went. However, Yihua Department Store itself was nowhere to be found on Baidu, Amap, or Didi itself, which usually means its Gemini hallucinating again. Or in this case, working with outdated info, since I suspected I knew what happened, and indeed, flipping Gemini to Pro mode (instead of Thinking mode) and ordering it to look for information on this mall turned up a video that showed that it had been shut down five years ago or something.

Which was fine, I was still at *a* mall, and it was interesting to see all the different layers of names for the place. Pengjiang Xingfuli was its current name, and Yihua Department Store an alleged former name, but Jinhui Yihua Cultural Plaza also came up on Amap, as did Jinhui Plaza, and Dingyi Square. There was also a large mall next to Xingfuli that was called Jiangmen Lihe, and as far as I could tell the two used to be one big mall that was now two smaller ones? I never did find the time to explore that second mall though, as this first one already took up the entire evening.

Anyway, the “smaller” of the two malls, Pengjiang Xingfuli, looked like this from the outside.

The other, larger mall starts from that Aeon sign in the background and stretches on past it.

Inside, the mall looked very shiny and bustling at first, and very proud of its pink bear mascot as well.

Uh.. right.

By and large, the first level of the mall was populated with REIT-style shops. Large chains, familiar names, and all that. Although there are many shops in China that I do not recognize and thus cannot really tell if they are a chain store or an independent one. I did find this shop though, and smiled because it’s named after a song that I like a lot.

I believe the second and third level skewed more towards independent stores though, and some of the shops were closed entirely.

But oh man, the fourth floor. The fourth floor was like a forgotten attic. I couldn’t even get up there at first, as the central escalators were outright sealed off.

But I eventually found side escalators that were not sealed off. Upstairs was.. a billiards room! The Chinese sure love their billiards.

A gym! This guy was doing golf swings in the gym.

And lots of other closed down storefronts and er.. blank canvases!

So hidden above and beyond the bright, well-maintained lower half of the mall was a very forlorn and half-used upper half of the mall. Here’s a peek at a staircase that I did not dare enter too, as it looked like the setup for a classical anime “locked in the gym closet” scene. Note that phone pictures always come out brighter than how it actually seems in real life.

The mall was not packed, but it was hardly empty either, though there was obviously a discrepancy between the bottom level and the other ones. But there was a weirdness to the mall that took me a bit to figure out. It was like people were just there to do their business and get out as quickly as possible. This was most evident on the ground floor, where this event was happening:

There was a booth where a woman was giving away balloon horses on wheels to children (I’m not sure if this required some sort of purchase redemption or something), and next to it was a stage with an entire set list of songs on display. And singers who the mall had hired/invited were taking turns to be up on stage, singing the songs loud enough that I could hear every word from the far corners of level 4. And they weren’t half bad either. But yet… those seats? All empty. Every last one.

Well, one or two seats were eventually taken. These next two are from when a man (on stage) and woman (in front of the stage) were duetting a couple of songs.

But I felt so bad for the singers, singing for what was essentially a bunch of empty chairs.

Next, I wanted to source dinner, so I took a peek at a food alley outside:

But it was rather cold and I didn’t want to walk back and forth here trying to decide on something to eat, I just wanted some sort of “comfort food”, so I went back into the mall and settled on a store on the ground floor called Magic Kitchen.

I was not expecting to see laksa here on the menu now that I had left Singapore, but it indeed was on the menu, so I ordered that along with something called “bear cub milk tea”, which turned out to be very interesting.

See, the way the milk tea drink worked is that the tea component of the drink is compressed ino the shape of the bear. Who then melted into the cup over time after I doused it in milk.

Tigey might have discovered a new plushie subjugation method similar to waterboarding.

After dinner, I headed down into the basement level of the mall. I had seen signs that there was a supermarket down here, but the layout of this basement was something else.

Whoa, food stores kind of like a slice of a Singapore hawker centre layout but not really, on the right, and a blank wall on the left. And behind me, a barber shop without any walls?

That’s a first for me! The food stalls were cool too. They reminded me of a school canteen in Singapore, sort of. Not the tables (they’d have to be long, rectangular tables) but the lineup of stalls along one wall at least.

And finally, the supermarket in question!

But before I went in, I needed to take a photo of this sign posted outside their front door to the right (above where the shopping carts were kept):

Seriously. Google had a better translation for 心中有爱 生活处处有阳光, which went “With love in your heart, life is full of sunshine.” That’s a little more accurate than “”Love in heart, there is sunshine life”.

Anyway, here are some requisite pictures of the supermarket:

But in particular, they had something here that I hadn’t seen any other supermarket have, which was a live catch section.

Where you could use a net to scoop out the still-alive marine victims that you wanted to buy:

Or a bucket, in some cases.

In this particular tank the crabs had won and had secured their survival by wresting control of the net though.

I ended up buying a bunch of things from here to try back at my hotel at some point, and a couple things to bring to Kel‘s place (the cookies) or home (the tea bags) too:

It was around 9 pm at that point though, and it turned out that while I was in the supermarket, it had begun to pour outside, the strongest rainfall that I’d seen this trip yet. I still ordered a Didi home, but it involved 10 seconds of dashing from that food alley earlier into the car through the cold rain, and then 10 seconds of dashing from the car to my hotel through the cold rain, due to inconvenient road placement. But I made it back safely and in one piece! Tigey had his new friends, I had a bunch of souvenirs and snacks, and a nice blanket to crawl under.