I’m halfway through my trip! The start of the trip was a bit rough, and there were definitely times when I kind of wanted to just go home, but I’m well into the swing of things now for the most part. I haven’t started missing my own bed yet, though that will eventually come, I suppose. I do miss my computer and its big keyboard and monitor though. And not having to do weird things to get around a national-level firewall. And there’s so many things I want to scan now.

But the world is big, and there’s plenty more to explore before I need to rest. These “power plays” in life, travelling to new places and seeing new things, are so rare, so far apart from each other, and so valuable. And even though I like working on my blog during these trips, and working on work responsibilities also lets me stay away from the country for longer, I definitely feel like I’m not spending enough time out and about sometimes since I seldom go out until at least 1 pm, sometimes 2 pm, on any given day, due to all the other things I have/want to do first every day.

And then there’s all those travel days, that I know are slightly problematic from my past trips since they’re often exhausting, and the entire day and sometimes part of the day before are burnt due to the travelling, but I always schedule so many of them in to try to squeeze in an extra city or two. Aaargh. Why. Why.

All this is to say, I have a somewhat early morning train ride from Zhanjiang to Jiangmen tomorrow, and so I probably won’t sleep, or won’t sleep much, again, so as to be more easily be able to sleep on the train itself. Even though that will also make me woozy through tomorrow evening. It will also let me finish this blog tonight though, since I won’t be able to write it in the morning of the next day like I usually do. But thankfully, since I only really go out during the afternoons anyway, it never really gets too out of hand in terms of post length. I mean, some of them are monstrously long, yes, like yesterday’s, but can you imagine if I was actually out for a full day? There’d be like 200 pictures every day!

Anyhow, today’s blog starts off, as always, with me leaving the hotel a little after 2 pm. I had mentioned two days ago about a bunch of roadside eateries near my hotel that I’d “save for another day”. Well, today was the last full day I was going to be able to be in Zhanjiang, and it’d be unlikely that anything would be open at 6 am even if I were so inclined to go out to an eatery before my train ride, which I wasn’t.

So I walked down the row of eateries looking for something to eat, and got lured in by an auntie-type staff member of one of the eateries that reminded me of an izakaya, the way they had lots of skewers and alcohol on sale. But they also had one item that was on my list of Zhanjiang must-tries that Gemini had generated for me sometime back, so I let myself be dragged in by my metaphorical nose-ring, and sat down by the window in the fragant restaurant, which was named Yeyuan Four Seasons.

I saw some of these wine jugs in here that I had seen in the restaurant yesterday as well. Interesting.

The dish I ordered here was just a plate of oysters — apparently something the city is famous for, being by the coast. I had a choice of medium for 59 yuan or large for 119 yuan, and I took the medium. There were also two choices for flavours, original or minced garlic, and the staff member who was definitely going to get a commission off of me said she could arrange a half-half so I cold try both. That sounded good, so that’s what we did.

The oysters came a little after that and they were huge. Relatively speaking anyway. Oysters have always been kind of annoying because they take up so much space on the plate but have very little actually edible stuff per oyster, so I have always felt that ordering oysters was a bit of a scam. But here I was anyway, with a 59 yuan middle dish in front of me. It wasn’t filling, but it was fancy, and the oysters were so big that I wondered through most of the meal if the auntie had tricked me into two mediums making up a half-half large dish or something. But nope, the 12 giant oysters cost 59 yuan in the end, so about 1 CAD each. I also had to break all of the original taste ones open by hand, as they didn’t actually bring an oyster shucking knife to the table until I had one left to go. I also have no idea how to use that sort of knife anyway, so there was that too. Thankfully the garlic ones came pre-shucked so I only had to break half a dozen open in the end.

My aim for today was to explore a (locally) famous district called Chikan on the north side of town, and one thing I’ve learnt about the road my hotel was on over the past couple of days was that the traffic near the intersection was always really busy, so to help save the driver’s time, it was useful to cross to the correct side first so they didn’t have to do a big loop or cross unnecessarily through that insane crosswalk I’ve posted a couple pictures of already. This insane crosswalk:

My driver ended up having to drop someone off past the other side, so I watched him go through it once, make a U-turn to drop the other person off, then have to brave through the intersection again to make it to me though. But if I hadn’t crossed the road, he would have still had to do that, make another big loop to get to me, and then go through it one more time to even start on the ride north.

My destination was a mall near the southern end of the district called the World Trade Centre, although Amap called it World Trade Mansion instead. Well, actually, it called the mall the World Trade Masion, missing the first N in its name altogether. Hopefully it fixes that jank at some point.

The mall itself was a four storey mall:

With the bottom levels selling clothes, from fancy branded stuff (of brands I did not know) to stuff like this:

I’m not sure what distresses me more, that there were shirts labelled Boaelove Vhaistmblove or that there are actually a few Google hits on that phrase, pointing to other extremely dubious Facebook and Instagram shops selling that shirt. What does that even mean? That’s so AI slop-like (although I feel like these sorts of fake-English T-shirts existed before the advent of AI too.)

Anyway, back in that outside picture of the mall’s name, there was mention of a HYPERMARKET named SPAR, and I found it squirreled away on the rear side of the mall. It actually wasn’t nearly as large as some of the other supermarkets that I had seen recently, so I was slightly disappointed there at the hypermarket designation, but it was decent still.

I was looking for local specialty teas again but did not end up buying any, neither here nor anywhere else that I went to the rest of the day. However, I did find some cool things for my scanning archive here. Specifically in this sweets section:

Apparently, when they empty the candies out of the boxes into the shelves, each box also comes with a slip of paper called a product quality certificate, and they took one of each one and slipped it into a display next to the price tag for each type of candy. However, they left a bunch of “spare” ones buried in the candy shelves themselves too, between the actual pieces of candy, as I guess they don’t always remove the extras when they refill the shelf with boxes when the shelf already had a certificate on display. So I rifled through the shelves and found a whole bunch of them. After deduplication, I walked off with seven for the archival files.

I doubt anyone else finds those cool but me, but I found them really cool. And they were free, though I technically didn’t ask for permission before I took them. I didn’t take any of the ones put up for display though, as that wouldn’t have been right.

After leaving the supermarket with my precious ephemera, I went to check out the top two levels of the four-level mall. The third level was apparently dedicated to young children, with stores selling children-sized clothing, an art academy with some neat pictures on display, and an arcade that was absolutely packed with children (and had a ball pit for the really young children, too).

The top level was a food area, with restaurants and stalls, but as I had arrived between the formal lunch and dinner periods, there were actually very few people up there and several of the stores were closed to prepare for the evening rush. I did a quick walk-through and then beat a hasty retreat.

The mall didn’t do too much for me in the end, and there was lots more that I wanted to see anyway, so I set off north along the side of the road, brandishing my umbrella to swat away the heat and the motorcycles.

I saw a couple of “Toilet this way” signs through the day and was thoroughly puzzled by them. What toilets? And why would there be public toilets here? Who maintains them? Why?

I also found what I think was random luggage storage lockers at the side of the road.

They were near the southern side of the place I was headed, Chikan Old Road, also known as Chikan Ancient Commercial Port:

Apparently I didn’t take a picture of the map that includes the legend for the numbers, but I honestly wasn’t too worried about  looking at the ten ancient ports or whatever that were still here, I’m not really interested in that sort of history or the structure of a guided trip like that. I just wanted to wander and see the shops and buildings here and now. With sights like these:

This guy was asleep! Without a care in the world.

There were a lot of stores like this next one, offering rented outfits to ladies so they could walk around in really pretty traditional attire. I didn’t opt for it myself, it’s not my sort of thing, but I did see many people walking around dressed up like this (and even a handful of boys, too) through the beautiful afternoon and evening after the sun vanished behind the clouds for good.

Like the girl on the left here.

And somewhere around that row of stalls above, I found this stall:

Yay, a new caricature for Tigey! Ths guy was happy to draw His Royal Unfluffy Majesty as tribute:

It cost 39 yen for the coloured version, and was very much worth it. That’s my 12th artist rendition of Tigey, 13th if you count a digital one from a video game.

He was so absorbed in drawing Tigey that a group of deaf or mute people came by his shop at some point and tried to inquire about the price of some model cars that he had to the side of the table. They didn’t manage to get his attention though, and I had to speak up to make him realize what was happening, although I didn’t realize that they were deaf or mute at first until they broke out into a flurry of sign language after he said that they were 25 yuan each. I think they thought he said 20 though, or at least whoever in the group was not deaf and was trying to relay the message to the others, but in the end they didn’t buy anything anyways.

Gemini also pointed out a distinction that I had missed later on in the evening when I was reviewing the day’s loot. This artist actually only does headshots, it says so in his shop advertising as well as the fact that all the sample pictures up on the side of his tent are just headshots too. But for Tigey, he actually did a full body drawing! So that was nice of him. I asked him to sign his name and he instead added the date and then added a “fù” at the end instead, so I’m using that as his artist moniker.

Next, there was this row of covered red and white stalls that I wandered into:

The Chinese characters for another of the specialty items that Gemini had mentioned over the last couple of days caught my eyes here, this 海味鸡仔饼 (seafood chicken biscuits, or phoenix cookies), so I grabbed a large bag for 25 yuan too.

As Gemini had explained to me four times over the past two days, this snack doesn’t actually contain chicken, and instead has pork, seafood (dried shrimp), garlic, peanut, sesame, and the AI chatbots only know what else. Apparently a little bit of liquor even. Ignoring the bottle of tea, the packaging looks like this:

I thought I was paying a tourist premium for this by buying it here, but Gemini disagreed, especially since it gave me a normal retail price range for the item before I had disclosed my cost for this one, and it was smack in the middle, and was for a large bag to boot. It also pointed out that according to the bag material, the biscuits were made on Beiyun Road, which was just north of the Chikan Old Road/Port area, in what probably was a small-scale, local manufacturing “factory” that was someone’s family business, and that then sold them to this local vendor. All very neat, and information I would never have put together on my own, even if some of it is slightly speculative. It was also impressed that the cookies were made on Valentine’s Day. Apparently they last for 120 days before starting to go bad, and apparently they have a strong scent that can be offputting to some, so I’ll save them for when I get to Kel‘s apartment before I open them.

I went back to walking again after this. The row of stalls opened up into this upwards-sloping alley:

But I didn’t feel like going up there, so I explored left and right instead. I ended up at this teahouse next, noting the two dressed up girls seated on the left outside the shop:

Another item on Gemini‘s local specialties list I had not tried yet was tong sui, or sweet soup, a class of local desserts, and here I ended up trying Osmanthus & Fevervine Tong Sui after feeding Gemini the list of local specialties on sale to translate and recommend. Fevervine here is Jishiteng in Chinese, which apparently literally translates into English as Chicken Manure Vine. Something about the way the plant smells or something.

The dish itself was fine though! The stuff in the soup was a bit.. herbal, almost seaweedy, but with a slight tinge of sweetness too.

And then it was off walking again! I needed to source some dinner, and I was looking for some white cut duck to pair with the excellent white cut chicken that I had eaten yesterday. Between peeking into stalls along my wandering path, I took several more pictures of scenes that I liked.

There was this nice area with yellow walls that I almost ate at, but the duck rice store here was out of duck for the evening. Oops. In this area was also an old well:

And I noticed that a shop right across the road from it was literally named “Ancient Well”.

That amused me. I also saw a stray cat, my first one in China and second one overall, staring at the menu in front of the shop. Well, it was staring at it a second before I pulled the camera trigger.

The owner and I had a good chuckle about it, as it looked like the cat was hungry and thinking of eating as a patron in the restaurant.

Finally, I ended up at another roadside eatery called Ma Sanjie Seafood Tossed Noodles (马三姐海鲜捞粉店). It wasn’t quite white cut duck, but Gemini saw another local specialty here that it recommended, Ni ding (泥丁) or mud worms/mudskippers. I was ready to try a dish with a bunch of them, but sadly they said that they were almost out and couldn’t make that dish any longer, so instead I settled for Seafood with Beef Lao Fen (Tossed Noodles), which featured a couple of those mudskippers added as garnish on top.

They’re those striped things. They were okay, they didn’t really taste like anything in particular and were a little bit chewy but that was about it. The meal itself was kind of small too for something that cost 33 yuan although I guess I’m getting spoiled since that was only $6.58 CAD anyway.

Due to that though, once i was done and was trying to walk out of the area to catch a Didi home from a reasonable location, I walked past another random coffeeshop that was actually selling the white cut duck that I had been trying to find all evening, and I decided to have a second dinner, their small/normal helping of Roast Goose and White Cut Duck Rice (烧鹅拼白切鸭饭) for 25 yuan ($4.99 CAD):

All the little extra vegetables and soup here made this quite a nice meal, but as far as I could tell there wasn’t actually any goose here, so it was probably just because the name of the store was Xingfu Hong Kong Roast Goose (兴富港式烧鹅) and maybe the “roast goose” part of the name of the store was appended onto the front of the dish as an identifier? That wouldn’t make sense though since not all the dishes were named like this. Or maybe the goose and duck just looked very similar here? There wasn’t very much meat at all in general though, I guess since I picked the smaller bowl (though the larger one was only 5 yen more), and the thing in the soup was only a large bone, with zero meat at all.

Also, the table had a couple of ants wandering between the underside and topside of it, and a couple of flies jumped onto my sling bag and started crawling around as I ate… the food was safe while it was on the plate, but definitely was out of bounds the moment it touched the table — there was no three second rule at play here.

After my second dinner, I took a quick walk along the canal/river that bordered the edge of the old street/port region, peeking into one shop in particular that was full of pots that made me happy as it reminded me of preserving food in Vintage Story.

I then hailed a ride home. It turned out that the way the app calculated the route, the poor car had to cut through the entire area to get to me anyway, so I spent a few minutes walking through a nearby, near-empty strata mall called the Xingfuhui Business Center. It seemed to be full of antique shops from the brief part of it I saw, and the only real reason I didn’t cut these pictures from the feed is because I saw a No Photos sign on a corridor wall at the very end of my circuit and wanted to disobey it (that and I hadn’t seen that sign anywhere else in the mall that I had already gone through). That long and uneventful ride back concluded my night. Thank you for reading my blog as always!

Okay, there’s one more reason too, which is that I wanted a buffer of pictures to conceal this final note. Once I had gotten into the car and it was taking me away from the area, we passed by a roadside cart that had a big 狗 symbol on its side, and then a 白切狗 on the front. 狗 means dog, so that guy was selling white cut dog meat! Yikes.