I swear Jiangmen is just cursed or something when it comes to my experiences here. First the phone battery scare three days ago, then the sick day and the throwing up of my previous evening’s dinner yesterday, and now this morning I wake up with some diarrhoea that sent me to the bathroom something like six times in two hours.

In addition, some new problems would surface their way through the day. My body’s temperature would not fully stabilize until some point in the middle of the day, but a little bit after the toilet issues had subsided, I started getting these acid reflux reactions whenever I either lay down flat, or when I got fully upright after a period of either lying down or being at a 45 degree angle. Food, fooood.

On Gemini‘s suggestion, I ordered some plain white buns, literally plain buns with nothing in them, to help combat the potty problems, which (to me) obviously had to do with just eating nothing but porridge yesterday and drinking lots of water and tea. They arrived just fine, and they did help, even though they tasted terrible:

They’re basically sponges, Gemini said. I never want to eat them again. The delivery cost was also higher either because I ordered them at 5:37 am in the morning, or because the store was a little further (I didn’t really check this), or both, but it was still only 3.88 yuan for each of the 4 buns, and 7.76 yuan delivery, for a total of 23.28 yuan ($4.64 CAD), sooo.

After that, I got tied up in some drama because Gemini noted that I could also buy some medicine and/or “groceries” online through Meituan, and I thought that that would be kind of fun. So, from the safety of my own bed, I tried ordering three things that Gemini had suggested I do for maximum recovery speed — a bottle of Pocari Sweat, a bottle of Mizone, and a pack of saltine crackers.

I tried doing all that, only to run first into a Meituan error that seemed to indicate an app update, then into a really weird scenario where I learnt that I could either pick the crackers, or I could pick the bottles of drink, but not both. It’s like they were separated in the store inventory or else somehow mutually exclusive from each other. And yet I had to hit a certain minimum threshold to be able to even make my purchase in the first place.

Worse, while I was doing this, my account was again flagged for unusual activity by Meituan‘s absolutely stupid security system, and it got locked out again! My rage knew no bounds and this actually caused a marked bump in my recovery progress, as the rage washed away some of the lethargy that had been surrounding me or something.

Worse, when I contacted customer support about it, I first got transferred to someone in the flash deals section or something since I had come in through the convenience store support channel, and I guess one or two of the items I had in my cart were flash deal items. I was screenshotting the error message from that page when I tried to check out and was trying to get help from that.

Anyway, this person had no idea what she was doing. She tried to validate my 1-780- telephone number but could not send me an SMS as she did not understand that it was an overseas number. She also tried to change the 780 part into 87 a few times in chat, as though trying to make it fit some mental box that only she understood. She even said that I couldn’t be validated because she tried to call the number, and a woman ACTUALLY PICKED UP THE PHONE and said it wasn’t her with the issue. How? Who did you call exactly? How did things go so wrong?!

I hung up from that useless customer service rep though, and contacted Meituan support again, but this time using the general help chat line on the login page on the app. Now, in both my conversations thus far, the “xiaomei” (小美, its just a cutesy generic name) rep on the other side has been able to speak in Chinese and I’d just reply in English and we’d go back and forth, but this customer support girl could not seem to do that and asked if I could do it in Chinese instead. So I pulled up another window with Google Translate and did what I could. I thought at first that she was just clueless too in a different way, but then I realized that WeChat has  built in translator, and I think the first two support sessions I did were through WeChat, and this one that I was attempting was not? Something like that. That’s the only plausible explanation anyway, she may just have been uncertain how to or unwilling to help someone in another language.

Regardless, this actually turned out to be the fastest support session of the three that I had done thus far, she was somehow able to send me the SMS that the second xiaomei could not, and I gave her the number and that was it, my account was unlocked again. I did notice that she quoted my number as 1_780-, so I wonder if that was a typo or if area codes need to be specifically identified in Meituan‘s outgoing call/SMS system and the second girl was just super clueless.

Whichever it was, my account was unlocked, but I tried one more time and the purchases were still segregrated from each other and blocked somehow. Rather than risk being locked out again, I used my rage-induced energy (Gemini called this the Meituan Meltdown) and just decided to venture outside to the nearby Wanda Plaza instead, where I knew a 7-Eleven lay in wait.

I took the opportunity here to pass by one of the two festival grounds that I had seen the other day when I was going to the museum, the Jiangmen Premium Foreign Trade Products Promotion. It felt like forever ago now.

This trade fair was interesting insofar as the variety of items it featured.. there was everything from a tent featuring motorcycles, to one featuring standing fans, to one featuring… packing tape:

There was one doing luggage, a couple doing food products, and a couple doing pots and pans, like this one:

There was one selling Chenpi Tea that stood out to me. Chenpi Tea is a regional specialty, isn’t this fair supposed to be for FOREIGN trade products? Isn’t this like selling water to a drowning man at sea? Well, whatever. There were quite a lot of tents overall, and I did manage to snag a couple of high-quality paper ephemera from some of them, so that was nice.

But ultimately I was just passing through the fair to get to the Jiangmen Pengjiang Wanda Plaza, and I didn’t want to linger out too long in case I suddenly became ill or something again. So out of the sunlight and into the air-conditioned interior of the mall I went. I still don’t understand why this mall is so deserted. Look at that forlorn train of seats being pulled along by the one lady in the conductor carriage.

My indoor escapade didn’t last long though, as I found out that the 7-Eleven was actually on the outside and only had an exterior door, so I had to venture back out anyway. But this didn’t bother me too much — even though the temperature had said that it was 18°C, I had my sweater and long pants on and wasn’t feeling cold at all. This was the haul I made it out with in the end.

On the way back, I passed through the trade fair again and it struck me how there were many people there that were just part of a business group. So basically people in suits, breezing through the fair in groups that were as small as 2-4, to as large as 20-30 at a time. It looked so formal, and strongly reminded me of Japanese after-work forced socialization with superiors at a drinking bar or something. Like everyone was just putting on a show to look good to their seniors/juniors. It was so weird! And more groups were coming in from the fair on the other side of the road as I left this one.

That “other fair” was the 4th Jiangmen Coffee Culture Festival, the setup of which I had also seen while outside the museum two days ago. It runs from Mar 05-Mar 08, so today was its first day.

Apparently admission was free, but I needed to scan a QR code at the front to get in, assumedly because they were doing visitor tracking or something. The mini-application on WeChat did not accept my phone and/or phone number or something though, and after a couple of errors one of the girls at the gate who had been trying to help me with it just waved me along in. Ha. Undocumented visitor, that’s me!

It was basically a large food fair, with a few non-stalls along one of the sides, and despite the coffee moniker there weren’t that many coffee stalls.

It was a dangerous area for me though, since I was hungry and there was so much tempting food here. So many inter-sting stalls that I could have tried if only I hadn’t gotten sick.

This stall again has nothing to do with Linlee, but has a giant rubber duck just sitting there for fun anyway…

This one made me hungry and I liked the way they happily bounced Chinese and English words together:

But making myself hungrier was a bad idea, so I hurried home and set myself up in my hotel room again to catch up on my blogging deficit. Which I’ve now mostly completed. Gemini made up a biscuit schedule right down to the number of minutes between each biscuit and each sip of water and/or Pocari Sweat, which I was happy to oblige since I was too focused on trying to catch up on the blog. It was also generating new imperial titles for Tigey in every other reply to me for some reason, which amused me. By the time evening rolled around, I felt almost completely fine minus the acid reflux, but I was still warned against eating “normal” food tonight since tomorrow was a travel day, so I sadly passed on that for now.

I feel like I ultimately never really explored Jiangmen at all, like there’s a whole southern section that I had plans to visit but never got the chance to, yet this part of the trip will probably stick out to me as the most memorable just due to how miserable it was, ha. And how different it was from everything else on my trip except that one early incident in Hokkaido.

Also, while in both my Haikou and Zhanjiang hotel rooms, I would occasionally hear noises at night that sounded like either fireworks, or a flurry of gunshots, but I would never be able to tell what exactly they were. Here tonight, working on my blog at around 9:30 pm, I heard similar noises again, looked up, and there were literally fireworks not far away from where I was, visible right out the window from the angle that I had from my bed, behind the bank building across the road. They were low fireworks, and didn’t last very long, but long enough for me to serendipitously catch them to confirm my suspicion that that was what the noises were.

The cleaning lady that reminds me of my old babysitter came by again, with another four bottles of water. How nice of her.

Lastly, I’ve been monitoring my Singapore roaming SIM card, from SIMBA, since I only have a total of 50 GB of data to use for “APAC + China + S.Korea”. It’s been working very well and has bypassed the China firewall with no issues at all since it’s a roaming data plan, and it’s even the plan I use to connect to WeChat, Meituan, etc just fine (my issues with Meituan stem from it hating overseas numbers and just shoddy coding in general), but two noteworthy things happened today with the SIMBA plan. The first was that I got an update saying that Japan and Australia were now included in that APAC roaming data pool for no extra charge. Sweet! Due to fabulous foreplanning, the SIM card that I got lasts until Mar 23, so that will actually last me through the end of my trip without me having to do anything special in Japan to get mobile data there for my final few days.

Secondly, for some reason, the data pool reset itself back to 50 GB, I guess either due to the company’s birthday celebrations, or due to the change in country scope, both of which happened today, Mar 05. I had used about 1 GB a day of data and was down to around 40 GB of 50 GB remaining after my first few cities in China, and this included occasionally throwing my laptop onto it via USB tethering as well when I got frustrated at the hotel WIFI being too slow. So all in all, I would have been nowhere near using up the entire pool anyway. But still, that was cool.