I forgot to mention one thing on yesterday's excursion to Pudong that I only remembered when I boarded the train today. A lady gave me her seat with a 请坐 and insisted that I sit down when I shook my head, refusing to accept my 不用. What. I know I have lots of grey hair now but how old do I look exactly?! I was only carrying my usual somewhat large sling bag, but I didn't think I projected a "need a seat" aura. Unsure if thankful or rude, haha. I did take a picture of her surreptitiously but will refrain from posting and preserving it on a certain archivist's blog for all time, for now. As I'm still not sure if I'm thankful or insulted by the offer!

Also, I received some pleasant news in the morning regarding a friend that I will probably be able to meet up with while in Tokyo. So stay tuned for that, I'm super excited!

My morning started with a very standard pattern by this point. A picture of the new noodles (I thinkthis one is very similar if not exactly identical to the first day's though, which means they probably rotate through three noodle types), then two plates of food, then one cup o' juice to wash it down.

But today was different, since I was checking out by noon and leaving my luggage at the hotel front desk until 7 pm or so, at which point I would pick it up and figure out how to get to the maglev station, Longyang Road Station. Hopefully by that point the camera would have made it in too, since it still wasn't there when I checked out at 11:50 am after a quick shower and a desperate search for a missing sock (which I found). I like this hotel because they actually give you a card for your luggage so no one else accidentally or maliciously takes it while you were away. This CitiGO hotel does a lot of things right, though I finally saw my first little bug in Shanghai while in the lobby today, one of those large, pale flies buzzing around a plant near the window.

Even though it was raining aaaagaaaain, I still had 7 hours or so before picking up my luggage and heading to the airport, and I wanted to spend it in a better manner than staring at a fly buzz around near the idle butler bot, so I trod back to the train station in the rain without an umbrella and took the train to Nanjing Road East again. This was the station that I had used to get back home after my trip to the Bund (west side) a few days ago, but apparently according to Gemini the local anime mecca was located here, and I wanted to take a look at it. I ended up in the front carriage of the train and actually got to see what the driver's compartment.. or lack of one... on a Shanghai train looked like for the first time. How weird. He's just standing there. Doesn't it get awkward during rush hour when the train is packed?

Anyway, this is what Nanjing Road looks like when it's raining (so less tourists wandering the streets), and mid-afternoon (so less tourists wandering the streets). Not that bad really.

The mall that I was targetting and that I found after a bit of searching was called Bailian ZX, and was where a bunch of major ACG (anime, comic, games) official-type shops were located. While there were a couple of miscellaneous shops too, this wasn't where one went for second-hand goods, I believe there's a separate mall for that somewhere that I did not have the time or energy to visit. This mall was not very big in terms of individual floor size, but it was six levels tall and was comprised of a lot of big names and official stores in the industry.

I was here to look for a couple things from a couple franchises, but completely struck out on finding them. Not really surprising I guess since they were rarer stuff. There were still lots of tempting items and a bunch of photo op points though.

And a room dedicated to fan drawings and scribblings:

Although they were not what I came here for, I ultimately did end up buying a couple of things from here anyway, firstly a shirt from Girls Band Cry that I fell in love with on the spot:

It says Tsundere in front, teehee. I don't know how true it is, but Gemini swore up and down that that was a really good price for a character shirt at $23.93 CAD, even better than I could get in Japan if I found the exact same shirt there in the official store, due to the weaker currency. But the price was palatable for me, and very cursory searches seemed to agree with Gemini, so I got it in the end. And then also a blind mushroom plushie from Dungeon Meshi. No eyes, but it has feet!

The shirt cost 120 yuan and the mushroom 45 yuan. More weight to add to my total.

The signs for their toilets were also really neat:

I left the mall soon after at around 3:30 pm, taking the train from East Nanjing Road to People's Square. I wanted to find a REIT mall that I could have lunch and take a break in, maybe find somewhere to hide out until 7pm rolled around to end my time in Shanghai, and while looking at nearby options that Gemini gave me, one jumped out at me -- Raffles City Shanghai. This shared the name as a mall in Singapore, and apparently actually might be built to look the same as well, but I'm not really sure because I haven't actually visited the one in Singapore. Maybe next trip!

I actually arrived at the mall via an underground passage, but let's start on the outside because I liked the view from here, with rain splashed all over the landscape like every single day that I've been here in Shanghai:

The inside of the mall generally looked like this:

There were 7 levels in the mall, and I heard a rumour that there might be a hotpot restaurant on the 6th level:

But without energy, I wasn't wandering up there. Thankfully, I was in a Singapore-inspired mall, and there was a Singapore-inspired restaurant down in the basement:

Why not go all the way back for my roots for my last meal in China, right. I still probably wouldn't have eaten there if not for this item in the menu though, which I found as I was flipping through in front of the restaurant while one of the workers in the back came up all the way to the podium the menu was on, as though to hawk his restaurant and invite me inside to eat. But instead he stood behind the podum and just... stood there meaningfully as I flipped through 30-something pages. It was so awkward.

But it worked, since I found the item below and got lured in by its siren song.

Fried Hokkien Mee is my favourite dish and quite a rare sight to see on menus outside of the immediate region around Singapore, even in stores that claim to be SIngapore-based. This one me 58 yuan and was not too bad, all things considered, especially the chilli, which was on point. It wasn't top 10 or anything like that, but it wasn't terrible either, despite my slight misgivings since a good chunk of the menu were not actually food that one could find in Singapore.

I then walked around the mall, picking up my 11th and final Linlee duck recruit for Tigey's army from a booth here that had a bucket of nice ducks to choose from. 11 in total, 7 from this trip, that is. He hadn't met the rest of the crew yet, and wouldn't until I reached my Tokyo room as he ended up chilling with Tigey in his carry pouch until then, but here's a sneak peek from later on at the airport:

But we were still 6 hours away from that at this point, and for now I consulted Gemini for a place to sit down and to my surprise Gemini insisted there were reports of a quiet, hidden away place with plush chairs by a visual museum across a cat store on the 5th floor. Although both the store names it gave me were wrong, I did find the "visual museum" across the "cat store" eventually.

Along with another store that had a cat sitting at the front of the store, looking very much like its owner.

But the plush chairs that Gemini talked about were not there, there were no chairs at all between the two shops and while there were seats in the front of the visual museum storefront itself, they were plastic ones. (And it was less a visual "museum' than some sort of virtual experience thing). Damn you, Gemini and your really specific hallucinations!

Or was it? Because, on the OTHER end of the level from those two shops, was this:

This was a gaming area where TVs had been set up in the center of the hallway with consoles attached to them... and plush couches where people could sit down, alone or with with a friend, and rent the consoles to play games in half-hour chunks of time. However, this was tucked away in a corner of the floor, in front of a restaurant that had nothing to do with the setup itself, and next to an escalator which was not working and was barricaded off anyway. A couple of the seats were already occupied by people just lying down and idly using their phones or just outright sleeping.

I had found it. My resting place. Did Gemini mean this? Was it coincidence? These console pod things were rare, I had seen maybe one per couple of malls at most, though it probably hinged a lot on what type of clientele they had or were trying to attract. Raffles City Shanghai was an affluent, high-class mall though so this did seem a little out of place.

Nonetheless, I did not only manage to find an empty sofa to settle down on, but it was specifically one where the TV screen was not even working anyways:

So it was not like I was costing the owners any revenue, right. Others did not care and drifted in and out of adjacent seats, not to play the games, but just to chill out and use the couches.

As a sidenote, many restaurants also put stools and chairs outside of their restaurant, purpotedly for use by people waiting for a space in the restaurant, or for people waiting for takeaway food pickup, but it seemed to be a bit of a social grey area and I often, but not always, saw people just sitting on them and using them as a break point in general too. Depending on how conspicuous the chairs were, I may have done this once or twice as well.

Anyway, I settled down here from around 4:55 pm to 7:10 pm, working on my blog a little bit on my laptop and browsing the internet on my phone as I charged the latter up with my power bank. Becaues I had checked out of my hotel, the sling bag I was carrying was heavier than the sling bag that I carried out of the hotel on a normal day, so I didn't really want to go wandering. It was nice to just sit down and have a nonbiri late afternoon and watch people go by, and planning my late evening escapade to the airport with fuzzy Gemini math.

After consulting with the bot and working backwards, I had indeed come to the conclusion that 7:10 pm was the best time to take a leave from my new couch palace, visit the washroom, then take the subway back one stop to Xujiahui Station for one last time. From there, I would walk back to the hotel (partially in the rain), and hope that my camera package had come in, and otherwise give the hotel concierge Kel's address and ask if he could forward it on to her if it wasn't there yet as I couldn't use the courier service once I left the country. I would then order a Didi to Longyang Road Station, which might involve a waiting period that we built into the schedule as well since it was raining and the hotel was attached to a busy downtown road. From there, I would have to catch the 9:00 pm, 9:20 pm, or 9:40 pm magnetic levitation (maglev) train to the airport. If I missed the last train at 9:40 pm, I would have to take another Didi to the airport instead, which would have cost ~$40 CAD instead of 40 yuan (~$8 CAD).

The front part of the schedule worked perfectly -- I was on the subway train at 7:25 pm, leaving Xujiahui Station for the final time at 7:42 pm, and back at the hotel by 7:50 pm. This time, to my immense relief, they actually found the box addressed to me after doing a search of the hotel shelves, and I got back a small box with my two DJI Pocket 3 camera batteries wrapped in bubble wrap inside of it. Hooray! I removed the box and the wrapper and gave it to the hotel concierge to toss away, and then called a Didi with one of the middle priority options to get me to the airport since it was raining. The concierge actually offered me a nice plastic see-through umbrella to outright take with me if I wanted, but I declined -- I was heading to the airport and already extremely over my allowed weight, after all!

At this point, I was way, way ahead of schedule since we had built in worst-case contingencies into the schedule. I was in the comfortable Didi before 8:00 pm and somehow at the Maglev station by 8:25 pm. So I caught the 8:40 pm train, a full hour ahead of schedule! This train was not packed at all, and there were tons of empty seats left open for the ~8 minutes of travel it took at a max speed of 300 km/h to get from Longyang to Pudong Airport, nonstop.

It was such a peaceful environment in the train, though part of that was probably the relief of finding my camera's lithium batteries. Gemini told me the train goes up to 430 km/h during the day, but only during 300 km/h at night. It also said that the train was silent as it floated above the tracks but that was a lie, as there was a consistent, mesmerizing hum as the train zoomed along toward the airport like a Japanese bullet train. I was far enough from other people that all I heard was a distant drone of conversation that mixed in with the hum of the train, and I liked that sensation so much that I ended up recording a couple minutes of that just to have a sound sample too. My only regret was that I didn't get to keep the plastic card that acted as the ticket once we reached the airport. The ticket was 40 yuan ($7.98 CAD), which included a 10 yuan discount as I was able to provide a trip confirmation "today" (actually tomorrow morning at 2 am, but the ticket lady okayed that too). At least I got three physical receipts for it for some reason. I did consider buying a return ticket for 50 yuan and then just not using it though, but Gemini talked me out of it and we moved on.

it looks like I never took any pictures of the landside airport of Pudong Airport itself except for this one, which was around the maglev train arrival area, which then split off -- left walkway for Terminal 1 and right walkway for Terminal 2. Travellators moved people along to the ends of the long corridor, where I underwent a scan with a rod for explosive powder or whatever, then had to stand in a containment area for 30 seconds or so just like in Guangzhou Airport before the lady guard there opened the stanchions/barriers to let me through. Still don't know why they do that particular step.

Astute eyes might notice that my terminology had changed a little as this blog post went on -- it went from hoping that my "camera" package had come in to being glad that my package of "camera batteries" had come in. I did not realize this, since my luggage bag was a cavernous black hole, but apparently Guangzhou airport had not actually removed my camera when they went through my bag after the X-ray, they instead just took off the battery handle (and took the backup battery) and left the camera itself in my bag. Since they had not returned the camera, I needed a visual confirmation that I still had the camera itself with me, and after finding a quiet corner in a very busy late-night landside airport departure area full of people waiting for late-night flight baggage check-in desks to open, I was elated when I finally found the camera! Everything was finally reunited. Dang camera. Since my one plan to bring it somewhere cool fell through early on, I never actually used it at all.

The other problem I had to deal with here was weight, as my big check-in luggage bag was at around 30 kg, which was my checked allowance, whereas both my backpack and sling bag were sitting at around 6.5-7 kg each, far over the 7 kg limit total that I had. Gemini suggested putting on some extra clothes (no) and hiding power banks in my pockets (I did do this part) and swore that I was doomed as Spring Japan, as a low-cost carrier, was strict about such things.

I was fairly sure that I could get on anyway, especially with my upgraded economy ticket, but this did add a bit of nervousness through the late evening and early morning. I was also a bit confused as Spring Japan never gave my Spring Plus ticket a lane for priority check-in or boarding in the end the way that Spring Airlines within China did. So in both cases I had to queue up in the middle of a long line which extended far, far behind me to get the usual airport pleasantries done. Immigration took forever, security check took forever, and I was glad to finally slump down at the overnight Juneyao Airlines 72nd VIP Lounge in the T2 airside area to sup on some late, late dinner. Here are some pictures of the lounge and my food!

There was apparently a noodle bar of some sort that I could have asked for them to make stuff from too, but after the long check-in and security lines I only had slightly over an hour here, and the seats that were open were somewhat uncomfortable and small, so I didn't even really end up eating much.

But in the end I was never weighed, not at the check-in desk, nor at the gate itself where Gemini was again extra nervous because the gate I was assigned to was supposedly an escalator down into a holding area where we would be prisoners waiting for a bus shuttle to take us to a plane, susceptible to agents looking for people to do bag weight checks on. That gate turned out to indeed have an escalator down to a second room after the gate check, but it never made sense to me anyway because they'd need to weigh and charge people before scanning their passes to let them into the gate area, and as it turned out the plane was parked right there anyway, and the jetway (or passenger boarding bridge) just started below there instead of up top. It wasn't a bus gate this time, but nice try, Gemini.

I was now on the plane safely, celebrating my avoidance of a $150 CAD or so overweight fine with Gemini before unceremoniously shoving it into the seat pocket in front of me. And everything else from here will go into tomorrow's blog as it was 2:20 am at this point, so... to be continued!