I fell asleep on the couch the previous night at 1 am or so instead of doing my blog, and when I awoke again it was 3 am and I blearily dragged myself into the room to faceplant on the stone bed. That didn’t seem to affect my timeline too much though, although I did fall a little behind on work.

However, Ronnie contacted me overnight (normal working hours in NA) and said that our departmental HR had flagged me for having too many vacation hours left, and could I please take a couple more vacation days, and prepare to have a meeting with him to come up with a plan to get me down under 1 year’s allotment (175 hours) when I get home. Maybe I’ve been a bit too conservative on taking them while actually on vacation. I added a few more days for the remaining two weeks of my trip, and an extra day after I get back home, and I’m down to 193 hours now. If I take the rest of the week off after I return, I’d be down to 179 hours, so maybe I’ll do that. And I did catch up on my work for the rest of the week (due to time off I won’t be getting any more work this week) later at night.

Also, at the end of the day today, after reviewing what packages had come in and what had yet to come in, and talking to Kel about both our plans for the end of the week, I decided to formally book my flight from Guangzhou to Shanghai for Saturday, March 14. This way I will have the 14th-18th in Shanghai, and then the 19th-22nd in Japan, and then I fly home. I have a 1 bag/30 kg limit for both my Guangzhou to Shanghai and Shanghai to Tokyo flight, and then that 2 bag/23 kg each limit for the Tokyo flight home.

Kel had an early day today, so I didn’t want to venture tooooo far afield since I planned to meet her at wherever I was for dinner. I ended up going to one of the mall complexes in the Nancun Wanbo cluster, somewhere that I had been to before the last time I was here. I went to an area that I didn’t visit last time though, and even between the two visits I’m not sure I’ve done more than half the entire Nancun Wanbo area.

The area that I took a Didi to this time was a complex called Sihai City, or Four Seas City. The complex itself used both names interchangeably. It was 15 minutes or so away by car and, as far as I explored, had a west er.. “bay”, I think a sign somewhere called it, and an east one too, divided by a road. For sake of this blog though, I will call this west plaza and east plaza for the rest of the post.

So the car dropped me off at the west plaza because it was closer and I was a cheapskate and selected the cheapest location when I was picking my destination. The west plaza entrance looked like this:

And the inside of the west plaza area looked like this:

There was an open area in the middle that kind of reminded me of Singapore (or Haikou) due to the number of coconut trees around, and then a round, building that circled it that was peppered with shops. There was a sunken plaza here (and on the east side too) that went down two basement levels as well.

I went down there for lunch, picking pretty much the first decent restaurant I saw, Ease Goose.

I ordered the Signature Roast Goose Four Treasures Rice there. This cost 49 yuan, but I was fine with it so that I could try a bit of everything on offer, even though there were cheaper versions that went for 29 and 39 that only had two or three of the meats but still functionally the same amount of food. And it was only $9.69 CAD in the end, right?

i didn’t like the top left sauce, but the mustard sauce in the middle was good and the ginger sauce in the top right was amazing. The food was pretty good, and I asked for a clean copy of the tray liner after and they gave that to me too, hah.

Next to Ease Goose was a small store called Blue Cat Art Shop. While I did not take a picture of the store, there was a girl in there doing art commissions and comics for passersby. I definitely wanted her to do one of Tigey, but she was occupied the first three times I came by the store, so I kept going off and coming back a little later until I noticed that she was free. Then I went in and commissioned a picture. I ordered the largest single panel one she had (she also did smaller multiple panels on request), and requetsed a colour version, and that came up to 85 yuan, or $16.82 CAD. She took a picture of Tigey then asked me to come back in 30 minutes. And when I did, this is what she gave me:

What a fantastic picture! And I love what she did with Tigey‘s carry bag as well!

Anyway in the interim between the multiple trips to that store, I walked around a good chunk of the west plaza. From the 2nd basement level, there was a double escalator going up to the ground floor:

However, *behind* the escalator was a little hidden cafeteria area, I liked this vibe and we almost had dinner here later on in the evening:

There was also another of those “smack the horse’s rump” posters in here. Very strange, very cute.

But we didn’t end up eating dinner here. Not far from here was a very colourful Thai restaurant, and we eventually ended up eating here instead.

But that’s jumping ahead to dinner. Right now I was still alone, walking the basement shops, many of which looked very cool to me.

One of the shops down here had a dwarf plushie that I was really close to buying. It cost 59 yuan, so a bit under $12 CAD, and I was wishy-washy on it all the way into the evening until I decided just before I left with Kel that I didn’t want it after all. The cons included how it was a bit too fuzzy and hairy, and that it was heavy due to beads, and that the staff members in the store liked to hover nearby to watch us whenever we entered the store, which was annoying.

The pros of buying the plushie? Dwarf. With axe and shield.

Oh well, maybe next time.

I then went upstairs, though like many malls in China, the downstairs level are more alive and the upstairs levels sometimes are a bit more dead.

I did eventually get to the fourth level though, which was an open-air balcony with potted plants that circled a good chunk of the central sunken plaza.

There was a giant pink bear plushie chained up at one end of the walkway for some reason:

And it was nearly 5 pm, so I saw restaurant staff at the other end getting ready for the shift change pep talk that I’ve seen many higher end restaurants do now. There was another one I saw shortly thereafter as I went back down the escalators too.

And finally, back down on the normal level again, I found a random throne and Tigey demanded a royal photo on it:

Who was I to say no to that. Very regal, Tigey.

I then crossed over from the west plaza to the east one using a second level walkway that went over the road that bisected the two:

That pathway led right to an interesting square with a horse corral and a dinosaur park above it. A kid was trotting around the corral on a pony when I arrived, as a brontosaurus or whatever long-neck dinosaur that is looked down concernedly.

Another horse was in a stable drying off, having just gotten hosed down:

And there was another stable with an alpaca mixed in with the horses for some reason:

Later on in the evening when I returned here with Kel, there were no riders but there were two ponies wandering around the corral instead:

At the end of the square was what I believe was a pet shop called Sam Club, though I didn’t actually go in. Not to be confused with the ubiquitous Sam’s Club.

They had a little statue out front with a no photos sign, but the English translation of the sign, “Not sure, not a shadow” has nothing to do with not taking photos, so I was fine, right?

That square led down into the eastern plaza itself from there, so I lumped a bunch of general pictures of the eastern plaza here for blog organization’s sake, even though some of them were from a little later on in the evening.

It had nice ambience and had a central sunken plaza too, but I felt like it was trying too hard to be upscale, and between the two plazas I preferred the western one for sure. Both in terms of the vibe and in terms of the shops available.

The eastern plaza had a capybara pen in the middle of it and a stage, and christmas tree, made out of capybara plushies though. So it did have that going for it! All the capybaras were asleep when I was there.

The best shop by far on the eastern plaza was a bookstore that I visited myself, and then came back to again later with Kel. It had lots of plushies, magnets, and other pricey trinkets that we nonetheless really liked looking at and pondering a purchase of.

There was a downstairs rest area and a few stools upstairs for people to read books at too, and also a cafe area upstairs where people could buy a drink and then settle down at a table overlooking the plaza to read or do homework at. Really great vibes.

There was a crafts area upstairs that I didn’t take a picture of too, and a colour analysis area where apparently they’d tell you what colour and what season closely matches your style. Something like that. I didn’t fully understand it even when Kel tried explaining it to me, though I didn’t get the feeling that she completely understood the why and how behind it either.

The first time I came to this western mall though, it was without Kel, but she had contacted me saying that she was on the way already so I looped back to her on the street level this time, passing along the outside of the eastern and western mall and seeing gems such as whatever this thing was meant to be:

And a band of two serenading passersby with music:

And a little holiday market, even though half the stalls were closed:

When Kel and I finally met, we went to get a Linlee drink in the west plaza, which led to both of us picking up another rubber duck each:

And then we crossed the bridge over to the stables area again, and down to the bookshop, catching us up to the current blog narration. I showed her a little niche staircase I had found in the eastern plaza:

For whatever reason, there were wide stairs leading up here, and two smaller escalators to the left and right of it, but neither one was working. Up at the top, two stores are visible, but that was literally most of what was up there. It was a small platform with two shops, another staircase up on the right that led to the street, and on the left there was this:

It was an unlabelled shop! I’m not sure exactly what it was, as we didn’t go close enough to take detailed pictures, although the sign up top seems to be 一代宗师 酱香之父, which translates to something like being a master of soy sauce flavour. It seemed like a teahouse of some sort though, and when I returned with Kel a second time to show it to her, we seemed to hear something like mahjong tiles clicking together somewhere inside. Maybe we were mis-hearing something else though.

Anyway, Kel showed me a hidden underground passage that I had missed that linked the eastern and western plaza together:

We dodged a bat flying around the eastern plaza and went into that passage, got chased out of a small art gallery there that we peeked at, and then eventually ended up at the Thai restaurant that I had mentioned earlier for dinner. Kel had been here before but had never eaten at that particular restaurant, and she said that the lines were always very long during the weekend, but there was no queue today so that seemed like a sign from the gods.

She checked her phone apps and found a two person deal with a bunch of dishes to try for 188 yuan (about $35-36), so she ended up paying for that. I reimbursed her later back home with a 100 yuan note to cover most of this plus the Linlee drink that she got me earlier. For the moment though, we settled down in the restaurant.

And took a picture of the dishes once they had all arrived. I couldn’t begin to describe exactly what each dish was, the bottom one was supposed to be Singapore-based black pepper fried shrimp though, the one above that is mango salad, near right was some sort of fried calamari, the one above that is water spinach, which was by far and away the best dish, and in the middle was coconut toast with kaya dip.

One dish arrived very late though, and we hadn’t realized that it was still coming, so we had to take a supplementary one later to accommodate it. It’s the Thai roast chicken chop in the top right corner here.

I also managed to detach and keep the little dinosaur paper figure mounted on the toothpick on the coconut toast, so that was nice. The food was pretty good and extremely filling, and we ate our fill, took our drinks to go, which come to think of it I still haven’t drank yet as of the next day’s afternoon, and wandered past a saxophonist playing Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On and several other songs for the diners outside another nearby upscale restaurant as we ascended back to street level to order a Didi home.

Once home, we did some supplementary things like planning for the weekend, pondering a quicker way of buying a razor that Dad wanted that otherwise might not arrive on time, and booking my plane ticket for the end of this week, making sure that we were coordinated before either of us retired for the night. Several packages that Kel had ordered from Taobao had also arrived already, and we opened them, particularly one of this really cute “crying horse plushies (local)” that had taken China by storm this holiday season. I didn’t see it in stores though so we just ordered one in instead while I was here so that I could bring it home:

I don’t know about sad, he looks extremely judgemental!

The other thing that came in was one of the two boxed sets that had come in for the anime I like that I had mentioned two days ago:

It’s an artbook plus a bunch of cards and stuff, and not very heavy at all, so that’s cool! I was happy with it for what I paid (about $10 CAD). It also came with a rather heavy empty photo frame to mount one of the provided photos in, but I didn’t care for that so I gifted that to Kel instead. There’s one more package that should apparently arrive tomorrow too. But not tonight, for tonight bed calls! Called? Called. That was last night now.