I’ve seen quite a few of these little buses around Haikou. They’re so small and cute.

End blog, see you tomorrow, thanks for reading!

Just kidding. I started my adventures fairly late today because of work and then my blog, not venturing out until it was nearly 2pm. This, together with the fact that the ride-hailing services are so cheap, means that I took a Didi car between all locations today, and will likely do so tomorrow and probably most other days going forwards at all until I leave China. Saves time, saves money. My average daily steps counter will take a small hit, probably, but I still ended up with about 16k steps today anyway.

I had two main stops today, and the first one was called Riyue Plaza, or Mova Mall. As far as I can tell they refer to the same thing, a large plaza area with twelve ginormous buildings forming a giant shopping mall comple thing. Each building was named after a western zodiac sign, and there were five eastern and seven western buildings, the “east” (东) and “west” (西) here being just a reference to which side of the park area the building was on. They were numbered/named like this:

东1 — Capricorn
东2 — Aquarius
东3 — Pisces
东4 — Aries
东5 — Taurus
西1 — Gemini
西2 — Cancer
西3 — Leo
西4 — Virgo
西5 — Libra
西6 — Scorpio
西7 — Sagittarius

and looked like this:

There was some distance between the eastern cluster and the western one, with an actual park area in between on ground level:

And while it was very walkable, there was also a tiny little shuttle bus that took people from one end to the other as well:

And a train? But I never saw anyone riding this one.

It was weird. Anyway, most of the malls consisted of shops whose only or main entrance faced the outside, specifically a central hub area that each cluster of mall buildings surrounded. There were walkways that led between the malls, and atrium areas with seating, and a decent chunk of the area, though not all of it, was covered.

There were also little booths in the walkway area between the malls here and there:

Most of the malls themselves catered to high-end, luxury boutique name brand sort of shops, and were more like western box stores shared by several shops with their external entrances, but that didn’t have an interior that could be entered and navigated the way that a traditional shopping mall did. A couple of them did though, like the Aquarius building, which was also alternatively known as GDF Plaza. GDF here stands for Global Duty-Free, they also had some large retail areas strewn around in the basement of several of the other buildings, like Scorpio and Sagittarius. Anyway, the Aquarius building was one of the ones with an actual internal area to walk around in “between” shops, even if virtually all the shops were still controlled by GDF.

Not everything was controlled by them though, since this building was where the local Wanda Cinema was squirreled away, on the top (fourth) floor, along with some restaurants, including one that I eventually ate at.

But before we get into that, the middle park area between the mall clusters was also interesting, with some displays and stuff set up:

An information booth that was unmanned (but that was translated so weirdly that it led me down a rabbit hole to discovered who Lei Feng was):

And there were some outskirt areas between adjacent buildings, away from their central-facing portions, that were much less crowded than the middle. One such area had a girl happily singing to passersby while an emcee presided over her:

There was also a large, underground walking  area that connected the east and west cluster, allowing one to mostly travel between the two without being exposed to the elements (much).

And the Riyue in Riyue Plaza is written as 日月, where the first character means sun and the second one means moon. So the connecting corridors between the two got translated into things like “Sun Moon Avenue”:

And this area I liked a lot, because a lot of the underground and semi-underground complexes away from the main malls were shuttered and either abandoned or never tenanted out to begin with:

Here’s a dusty bear statue that was outside a restaurant in the area that I was unclear if it was open or not:

And another one nearby that I was also unclear about:

There were vast swathes of this, which I really enjoyed since I like the liminal mall sort of feeling. It contrasted so well with the packed REIT malls above. But even down here, there were hidden “pockets” of activity and semi-activity! Like this amusement park:

And this very quiet hideaway that was an internal mini mall area with forlornly ignored arcade machines and a completely abandoned Samsung store, but also a VR center and a robotics corner that clung on for dear life:

And in yet another part of this vast subterranean cavern was an extremely active arcade that had no signs of being there from the outside — you just kinda had to know about it.

It was quite a sight all put together, like two or three very distinct shopping mall areas packed into one giant plaza! I did quite like walking around the area. As mentioned earlier, I also stopped by the 4th floor of that Aquarius mall to have lunch, specifically at a shop named Shiweiguan:

While I tend to favour eating at really cheap roadside eateries rather than upscale restaurants, I wanted to be nice to myself on Shiara Day for once, and also I was starting to realize how much purchasing power I had in China compared to how much an equivalent amount of food and luxury would cost in Canada. For example, this was my lunch meal:

From top to bottom, this was (I think, it’s all translated and translations are sometimes wonky):

Danzhou red fish cooked eggplant — 36 yuan
White rice — 3 yuan
Handmade Hainan Noodles (Small) — 28 yuan
Hainan double skin milk (original) — 12 yuan

All that came up to 79 yuan, which is a fair amount more than the price of a roadside eatery meal, like my beef stew noodles yesterday that only cost 18 yuan ($3.57 CAD). But it’s still “only” $15.75 CAD. Compared to my usual bowl of Tom Yum Noodles from Thai Express in Southgate Center that cost $15 for a bowl of takeaway fast food? I noted in my Discord afterwards that I should actually start eating better and trying out different restaurants and stuff while on this China leg of my trip.

Anyway this meal was great. The Danzhou (apparently another smaller city in Hainan) eggplant had little bits of fish in it, and the noodles, which are apparently a Hainan specialty, had little crackers, nuts, and what we call ikan bilis (dried anchovies) in it. The meal also came with some free tea that I quite liked, and I learnt that it was called Hainan Zhegu Tea (or Partridge Tea). I wonder if I can find some to take home with me. And the “double skin milk” turned out to be something very similar to beancurd, or tau huay in Singapore, with toppings on top. Pretty dang nice too.

Anyway, after the meal, and some more wandering, I left Riyue Plaza. One of the reasons I had come here was that I had asked Gemini where the ACG scene was in Haikou, and it swore that it was in Riyue Plaza. Now, Google has abysmal to nonexistent coverage and data in China, especially outside of the Tier 1 cities, so I took everything with a grain of salt anyway, but it was particularly bad here as it kept on insisting that there should have been a big artist alley sort of place n the basement area where the duty-free shops were, and there just were not. Maybe in the past, but certainly not now. I asked it for the names of some shops instead though, plugged those into Amap to find the nearest locations, and told Gemini that it was working with poor data again, and it suggested that I try another mall called Friendship Sunshine City, about 3 km away, instead.

I tried to verify this with my searches and with Gemini‘s provided links this time, and it seemed somewhat accurate but actual information was scarce due to the language barrier. But what the heck, it was only a 10.6 yuan ($2.11 CAD) Didi ride away, so off I went. Minus the solicitors constantly hounding people for rides, it was a pretty neat-looking mall from the outside:

An ad inside was a normal looking mall at first:

But although the main atrium that I entered by (on the south side) only went up to five storeys, this was actually a 9-11 level mall depending on how you counted it, since there were some levels numbered weirdly (like level 6 and then 6A). And the anime/ACG scene seemed to be centered around this resting area on the 6th floor:

There were easily a dozen stores with anime and anime-adjacent merch here, and lots of teenages and young adults roaming the place. A good chunk of them were even dressed up, with the most common look being random schoolgirl outfits that many girls were wearing. Even for the cosplayers, it was a mix of people there alone, with a bestie, or in a small group, and they wandered in and out of the figure, TCG, acrylic stand, and blind box stores in between stints of sitting down to rest and chat.

But anime stores were not the only thing here. I particularly liked this store named Bridge, half of it was a stationary store or casual bookstore and half of it was a cafe where people could come to with friends, sit down, and do homework or study. It was super neat to see and super cozy the way the two mixed together.

Very cool place. Very cool concept. Made me think of Persona 5, and I could hear its city music playing in my head as I surveyed the scene.

And just in case they needed a distraction from homework, right across and nearby was one of two (that I saw) game centers where I guess one could rent time to play a game with friends on a pre-provided console:

There were four or so of these tribute boards to characters that I saw in various stalls through the mall, here’s one chronicled as always:

Up on the 7th floor was this free booth area where anyone could set up a little vendor shop for others to peruse things. Or just, apparently, hang out and chat at.

The 8th floor had something like that too, in the middle of the hallway. More foot traffic, but harder to see the items on the ground.

There were tons of restaurants and eateries from the 6th floor up, it would definitely have been easy to overeat here and get so plump that you wouldn’t be able to leave.

And here’s a view from the 9th floor down:

Other interesting stores I saw include this “Cat Princess Durian Pizza” one:

This billiards game room:

This arcade where a mom and her young daughter were playing a shooting game and doing quite well to boot:

This plushie shop whose plushies were sadly all too pricey:

And finally, this indoor “food court” with vendor stalls in the middle and little eateries around the edges.

I almost ate at this stall, which was basically a Chinese version of Yong Tau Foo, with a price-per-weight system instead of a price-per-item system.

But in the end, I couldn’t resist trying out a hotpot conveyor belt store called Yixin:

This store featured 9.9 yuan (about $2 CAD) for the soup base, and 9.9 yuan more for a tiny tray of meat. Then other ingredients you could pick off of the belt as it went by, and depending on the colour of the bowl it would cost 2, 4, or 6 yuan per.

I went back and forth between the two stores before eventually settling on this one, and just in time too because they started closing about halfway through my meal. They did offer free rice though, which was nice, and at one point soon after I first sat down, a random white Linlee duck came floating by on the conveyor belt tray too, left there by another customer’s kid (as far as I could tell). The server and I had a laugh, and she moved it aside to the cash register area after I removed it from the conveyor belt, but I did end up taking it home with me at the end of the day too, much to Tigey‘s perplexity:

They’re multiplying! And I didn’t even visit a Linlee today!

Anyway, it was hard to take a full picture of my meal since it came by in stages, but at an early point it looked like this:

This meal ended up costing me 43.8 yuan, or $8.73 CAD. That’s 19.8 for the broth and initial meat tray, 5 4-yuan bowls, and 2 2-yuan bowls. And a Linlee duck. I felt like they missed a bowl somewhere along the way though, but who knows for sure. I didn’t stay to check and they needed me out of there anyway as they were closing up.

I took another Didi back to my mall hotel after that, which cost me 10.7 yuan ($2.13 CAD). Outside the mall, I saw a bunch of roadside vendor stalls set up, trying to cater to the hordes of motorcycles and scooters going by:

It’s like a mini night market! By the mall entrance that I was dropped off at, there was also a lantern display set up, although the stalls there were now closed since the mall itself was past its closing time and was shutting down.

It was a cool and breezy 23 degrees Celsius though, and people were still languidly hanging around, taking pictures or just chilling and chatting.

Pretty to look at, but nothing to actually do here, so i went back to my room after a few minutes. There was a bright half-moon out that I could see serenading me through my large bedside window:

I showered and then did my laundry in the astonishingly simple to use washing machine/dryer combo appliance, fended away the one or two flies that definitely live somewhere in my room, sorted my brochure loot and finances for the day, washed the Linlee duck since it still smelled like oily food, frowned at furniture scraping noises coming from the room above me, enjoyed some soft drinks, and maybe worked a bit on preparing for a certain blog entry too. A pleasant day all in all!