My package from the Guangzhou airport staff with the camera and battery that they took from my bag did not arrive today. I hope it arrives by tomorrow, otherwise there will be some juggling I will have to do to get the hotel to forward it on to Kel‘s place after I leave the country! What a pain.

Before I finished my blog last night, I also booked my final hotel, the one in Tokyo, which finally completes the last logistical piece of my trip unless I decide to do a full day’s trip somewhere crazy for one of my last few days, which is unlikely, but you never know. Tokyo hotels are expensive, and I ended up booking a business hotel near Haneda Airport as that’s where my flight home will be from and that was the cheapest one I could find that wasn’t located in Narita or on the very fringes of Tokyo in the wrong direction from my airport.

Simba also fixed their app, and my number reset to the lower number as though the app increase from two weeks ago never actually happened. Which is fair enough, but then that means they’ve been displaying the wrong number for two weeks. How awful. I’ve been tracking it fairly closely, so I know that I was down to about 40 GB left out of 50 when they reset it back to 50 GB on Mar 05, then as I ratcheted up my usage by connecting my laptop to it as well as my phone through the rest of the China leg of my trip, I was down all the way to 28 GB left by the end of Mar 15. Then on Mar 16 for some reason it reset to 40 GB again. And then on Mar 17, the remaining roaming number disappeared from the app altogether. And now today, I’m down to a little below 16 GB as of the end of the day.

I only have five days left on my trip, including the one day left in my China leg, after today, and the card expires on Mar 23 no matter how much data is left on it anyway, so I am still in no danger of running out of data, but it’s still annoying. What a buggy app from a careless company.

The buffet breakfast at the hotel today contained a new kind of noodle yet again, and this time it was kway teow, or stir-fried flat rice noodle, yum. I took my requisite two plates and a fruit juice drink:

I then went back to my room and bummed around for a while, before setting off again in the early afternoon. My first destination this time was a mall named Century Link Mall, northeast of my hotel at a station called Century Avenue Station. The coolest part of the mall, at least in terms of where I went, was this underground food street themed after old Shanghai.

There was actually a little train carriage at the end of the rails going through the food street that had a temporarily out of service note on it — I don’t know if that was just a permanent temporary note or if it actually does run back and forth on special occasions or something. Either way, it was cool. Some of the shops here were restaurants, whereas some were just shopfronts that shared, with other shops, general coffeehouse-style central tables for people to eat at. Or sleep at.

I ended up eating some “cross-legged beef” in soup, which was both medicinal as well as, according to Gemini, steeped in history, a way to use leftover beef offal instead of discarding it. I paired it with some lovely cabbage and some rice.

After eating, I left the old street and went up into the mall proper, loitering around this large atrium for a bit and enjoying the ambience there.

Walking around the shops a bit as I went upwards, I.. what even the? Never mind.

Looking down at the atrium from the top level gave me a measure of vertigo.

I found a little pickleball/football court up on the rooftop of the mall too:

As well as this bit of scenery, somewhat marred by the window bars but still decent, hidden away with benches on the top level:

After my wander here, I took a train to a neighbouring stop, the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum Station. I wasn’t actually going to the museum though, but rather checking out a network of shops that Gemini had pinpointed to be linked right to the station itself. This network of shops was collectively known as A.P. Plaza, although it was divided up into sections which had their own names too, like one called Fun Collection which had shirts, bags, shoes, toys, airplane models, alternate not-Lego bricks, and more. This section didn’t really allow pictures to be taken of shops, but that didn’t stop me from taking general hallway pictures that happen to include shops.

This area is famous for its fake and overpriced goods, and the idea is that you can apparently usually negotiate the prices down to 10%-30% of the original quoted price. The shop names also caught my eye, many of them were variations of “Western person’s name” “Item name”, as can be seen in some of the pictures above. Like 90% of the shops in this section if not more followed this rule. How weird!

There were also tons of tourists here, clearly speaking English or other languages that I didn’t recognize, and this brought back memories of the Onelink International Plaza in Guangzhou and the number of tourists I was surprised to find there. I guess tourists like their wholesale markets.

The area was huge and sprawling, and I was hoping to spend more time here, but a kindly middle-aged lady without a stall asked if I wanted to buy some bags, and then attached herself to me like a puppy and followed me around for several minutes, persistently trying to persuade me in a gentle voice to buy her bags, despite me saying no over and over and over again. I had two options here, one was to get physical on her and shove her away, while the other was to leave the area entirely, and I wisely picked the second option.

Across from the Fun Collection area was another zone called S.C. Plaza, this one was almost entiely devoted to tailors selling clothing, with multiple stores showcasing well-pressed suits that looked high-class and impressive, while also almost definitely being fake or no-name branded as well.

I’m not entirely sure which way I walked from here, but the tightly packed alleyways of stores eventually suddenly gave way to an area that actually looked more like a real mall with a few real stores, even though it was still part of A.P. Plaza. Mostly food, but there were one or two gift and computer retail stores too along with other facilities like a tutoring centre.

This part was neat, but I eventually looped back into the Fun Collection part again and decided to leave the area before the bag witch found me again.

I took the train a couple more stops to my third location of the day, Lujiazui Station. Besides my initial home stop of Xujiahui Station, I had not seen the red dispensing machines that would give me the QR transit tickets to keep, and I didn’t want any more of the plastic card ones as well since I already had two. However, at Lujiazui Station, I saw that the information booth there was selling not only transit cards, but commemorative transit cards, so I ended up buying one.

This cost 45 yuan (~$9 CAD) — he charged me 50 on Alipay, returned me a 5 yuan note, and gave me a 20 yuan charge on the card, which cost 25 yuan (~$5 CAD) itself. It was a pretty design, though there were a couple other designs that I kind of want to grab from another station too, especially an anime-themed one. But anyway, now that I had this, I just used this going forward for stations without the red ticket dispensers, which included my return journey from here later on too.

For now though, I stepped out of Lujiazui Station and climbed a flight of stairs to get to this, a circular, raised pedestrian bridge that would lead to my third major target location of the day.

It had been drizzling off and on today — and in fact pretty much every day since I just arrived here — so much so that the tops of some of the taller buildings were just altogether obscured by mist or clouds. The temperature was cool, but not that cold that it was uncomfortable to be outdoors, especially when a nice REIT mall awaited me at the end of my loop around the bridge.

This mall was called Super Brand Mall, and it was a 10 storey mall that had been very visible from across the Huangpu River, on the other side of the Bund, where I had been two days ago. I could actually see the mall’s name from all the way across the river, which is genius-level advertising, and this is visible in some of my uploaded photographs too if one removes the -scaled at the end of the URL for the full version of the picture. Anyway I found myself on the east side of the river this time, in Pudong, so I wanted to go check out the mall itself.

The mall itself was interesting — the east side consisted of most of the retail shops and a bunch of cheaper restaurants, whereas the west side, facing the river, had a bunch of more upscale restaurants, especially the higher up one went. This also meant that most of the mall’s patrons actually hung out on the east side of the mall, causing quite a population imbalance, although even on the east side the mall was not as busy as I expected. Not nearly as trendily busy as even Jiuguang Center, the mall I visited yesterday. A lot of the shops, especially lower down on the west side, were closed and under renovation/coming soon as well, which always seems like such a death knell to me. But what was there was pretty.

I noticed that there was a floor directory on each floor outside one of the elevators, so I went to the very top and escalatored my way down one level at a time, taking a picture of each one to preserve and maintain the current floor directory of Super Brand Mall as on Mar 17 2026. Or at least that was the plan, but when I took the public elevator up to the 10th floor, i got stuck in a little cranny that had a little gallery and glass doors on either end.

There was a guy bringing in a bottle of wine from somewhere at the end of the corridor that i was facing above, and when I asked him if there was  way to the stairs leading down (which I had seen from the 9th floor earlier), he said that the fastest way down was just to take the elevator again. He also asked a waiter who came to take the bottle of wine from him from the other side of the glass door, and the waiter also said to use the elevator. Basically the area was blocked off by the one restaurant (actually a bar that marketed itself as a “co working space”) that owned the tiny 10th floor space, called “eat n work”. The guy who had brought the bottle of wine actually showed me  side passage with a freight elevator and said I could use that to get down with him too, but although that would have been mildly cool, I declined and said that I had already pressed the elevator button for the four passenger elevators just outside.

So I took one of them down to the 9th floor instead, where I met a Meituan food delivery driver who was confused as to why the elevator down button had become unlit but none of the elevator door had opened. He was standing in front of two of them and did not realize that there were two other ones on the other side of the floor directory though, and laughed when I pointed it out to him after I came out of one of those.

Amusing human interaction anecdotes aside, here’s a gallery of the floor directories that I did manage to take pictures of, starting from the top and working my way down!