I thought Edmonton’s speed of building new railways was abysmal. But Zhanjiang doesn’t even have a railway line at all, possibly the first city I’ve ever been to like that, though Gemini claims it had pretty grandiose plans (like Haikou and probably many other cities) for the future. And it has over 7 million residents! I definitely do understand why it’s not a priority though, considering so many people have motorcycles and scooters, and it’s now connected via High Speed Rail to other nearby cities and towns too, but the longer you take to lay the groundwork for your city’s internal rail network, the harder it is to actually start it. Everyone who has played a SimCity or Cities: Skylines sort of game knows that. So ganbare, Zhanjiang!

I left my hotel at around 8 am, and had another nice, chatty driver ferry me to Zhanjiang West Railway Station to catch my train, so I left him with a nice postcard as well. That’s #3 that I’ve dispensed now. He apparently works another job and drives before or after work. But he had the 1w+ designator by his profile, which I think means he’s done over 10,000 rides. He said he’d been to Canada before but couldn’t tell me where because he didn’t speak English and it was over 10 years ago. None of the cities I named (in English) sounded familiar to him. He claimed he’s been to Canada, the USA, Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia in the past though. Thanks for the ride and the friendly chat, Mr Chen, of the 粤G6560J licence plate!

When I got off the car, I went to the ticketing booth to see if I could get a physical ticket printed, because I only had my digital one and I kinda wanted a keepsake. I’m not sure if it was a communication issue or if they truly do not do physical tickets anymore though, but the conversation just ended with a polite “You can just use the passport to pass the gate” after a couple minutes of cordial confusion. Oh well. I’ll try it my next train ride and see what happens too.

The actual security gate check took seconds as there was no line, and they weighed my water bottle but then gave it back right after. I was pretty much past it by 8:45 am or so. The station itself was cavernous but not very busy, with downstairs just being a secondary waiting area, and upstairs, where the lineup gates to the platform and the primary waiting area was, contained five shops on each end of the waiting area.

The left gate, as always, was the one for overseas passengers and their inconvenient passports to use.

My train was the C6916 route from Zhanjiang West to Jiangmen East, from 9:30 am to 12:00 pm, and its exact route looked like this (minus one day, since I could no longer pull up that day’s schedule once the train had left the station for some reason, even from checking my own ticket.)

The train itself was somewhat comfortable, but not very conducive to falling asleep on. I had only dozed off for maybe an hour last night so I was hoping to catch some winks on the 2.5h train ride, but no such luck. Part of this was because I had been randomly assigned an aisle seat, which I vastly prefer, but my first seat partner came on at Maoming and then went off at Dianbai, only to be replaced by someone else who lasted until the end of the ride, so there was a bunch of standing up and sitting down again.

The other reason was that for parts of the journey there were noisy people nearby playing videos out loud on their phone or talking loudly into phone conversations without a care in the world. Some people are rude like that I guess. This did not happen all the time though, but enough at random times to be distracting. Still, that meant that I could do some of this blog writing now so that I can get more sleep tonight.

Despite there being 15 minutes at the Zhanjiang platform to get on the train, there were also just 1-2 minute stops at each station along the way, as the schedule above shows, so I had this nagging fear that I would miss my stop as well if I had managed to fall asleep.

The train looked like this when we left Zhanjiang West:

And there was also a food cabin at the end of our carriage that looked kinda tempting, but I didn’t bite as I was going to be having a hearty lunch in the hour and a half or so period after dropping off my bags at my hotel and before check-in. This was the food cabin at the start of the ride:

And at the end, after I retrieved my suitcase, which I had left underneath that table on the bottom left of the above picture:

A bunch of people just standing up there as they rode the train. I know there were “standing room tickets” only too but they were the same price as seat ones. I should have taken a picture of that menu! I tried doing so on my way out but the people there, and the low distance between the menu and the wall, made it impossible.

Jiangmendong Station, or Jiangmen East Station, was much smaller in scope, basically one platform on the top and a small ticketing and waiting area below. This was the first instance anywhere in China so far though where I could just scan my passport and get through the gate without any friction, though since I was not expecting that I had automatically gone right up to the station attendant as always anyway, who then proceeded to just scan the passport at a regular gate. Oops.

I then took a Didi from there to my hotel, dodging a couple of people who approached me while I was waiting, offering rides. Gemini tells me, and I’d seen this term on a warning board back in Haikou, that these parasites were Black Taxi drivers (黑车, lit. “black car”) and they were scammers trying to profit off of the foolish or the tourist who didn’t know better, but I wish China did a better job of clamping down upon them, especially around major bus and train stations.

My hotel was called the C+ Hotel (Jiangmen Pengjiang Wanda Plaza), so in a spate of tiredness I got my Didi driver to take me to the Jiangmen Pengjiang Wanda Plaza itself, before realizing, as I got out of the rain into a light drizzle, that the actual hotel was one street away, about an eight minute walk diagonally across one junction. I also knew that it wasn’t a real “hotel” in the sense of the word, as their “check in desk” was on the 14th floor and it was an “audio visual” hotel like the one in Haikou, because I certainly hadn’t learnt my lesson about renting converted lofts and apartments. (It was actually because it was the only reasonable unit with a washing machine, I never did end up using the Atour one since it was a shared laundry room 14 stories down or something with only 6 available washing machines.)

Anyway, a light drizzle wasn’t enough to make me melt and it soon stopped anyway as I wheeled my poor luggage bag over to the actual building. The building was not a mall, but some sort of business plaza, and the bottom level featured a security guard. There was also a weird gap in process here — unlike the Atour hotel, where you could only use the elevator by scanning your hotel room card (and it would actually always auto-select your floor for you as well, even if you were headed to the 2nd floor for laundry, the cafeteria, or the gym), this one only allowed you to *call* the elevator down to the first floor if you had your card with you, though you didn’t actually need the card to then pick one of the hotel floors to go to. Weird. Thankfully, since this was the first floor, elevators constantly found their way down here anyway, and I hopped into one to the 14th floor only to find…

An honest-to-god reception desk! Not like the other place in Haikou! Even though I was an hour early and just wanted to leave my bags here, she also presented me with my room key right away in exchange for a screenshot of what sort of room I had actually ordered on trip.com (the Haikou place did this too — apparently they don’t really have the system to track these things) and a 200 yuan refundable damage deposit (double the Haikou place, but it’s still only $39.91 CAD). That first damage deposit was successfully refunded, too, by the way, back on Feb 27. I lost 9 cents in the transaction due to conversion rates or fees though.

Anyway, I took the elevator one floor up to my room, and took first-entrance pictures of the place. It looked like this:

A living room separated from the bedroom! With my own faux leather couch! And even a kitchenette, which I do like but hadn’t checked for so it was a surprise to me. No microwave, though, and the fridge was a little musty.

The bedroom was large and comfortable.

And had a nice, neon, night city view too — this was the view later on in the evening (though it wasn’t the view I could see from the bed, I had to actually go to the window for it since it was on the right side of my window’s viewport):

That blue Wanda Plaza building, by the way, was where my Didi car ride had dropped me off (because it was where I thought the hotel had been).

The bathroom was totally acceptable, there have been no bugs that I have seen yet, the toilet being inside the actual bathroom as opposed to being in a separate room was something I didn’t know I appreciated, and the shower head had a button that let you turn the water flow into a jetstream coming out of the front of the head instead of flowing down like every other shower head ever, which amused me. Never seen that before.

The washroom also had this oddly translated sign:

This one definitely was an actual home at one point. Like a full apartment suite. There was also this one room that went nowhere:

Used for storage or laundry most likely. There was also paper… stuff in the washing machine:

But the reception desk had asked me to add them on WeChat/Weixin and let me know if there were any issues, and when I told them about this they sent a cleaning lady by to clear it. They apologized for it and I said it was no worry at all since they had let me into the room an hour early.

The washing machine itself was out on a small outdoors area that I hesitate to call a balcony, it was just an alcove, in front of the bathroom vent, with concrete on five of its six sides and a grille that separated it from the air-conditioning unit that was then behind another grille on the sixth side. There was also a chain above it where I was probably supposed to hang up my clothes to dry it after washing, since the washing machine had no drying component except for centrifuge motion. I didn’t like that though, so when I did laundry later on in the evening, I hung it up on a pole in the bathroom instead. There was also no detergent, but when I inquired about that in the evening, the nice girl at the reception desk came up to my room with seven (!) of those dissolvable detergent capsules in a cup.

Since it was an, uhh… “audio-visual hotel” room, there was also a projector:

And it projected stuff onto the wall in front of the couch:

After settling in, I went out for lunch again. I headed back to that Wanda Plaza where I had dragged my luggage from:

And went in and walked around.

The mall was actually really quiet compared to the malls I had seen over the past few days, but I was definitely not the only one walking around, as this robot was wheeling its way along one of the corridors as well, looking for victims:

I stayed well clear, since I was looking for food. I eventually ate at a store called Jintang Chao after feeding Gemini a half a dozen menus or so, looking for something local. It suggested claypot eel rice from this menu:

And I ordered the medium one, for 53 yuan (plus 3 yuan buckwheat tea gratuity, and the 56 yuan total converted into $11.17 CAD). The rice took forever to come, since it was a claypot dish and they made it from scratch, but I had another major issue in the meantime anyway.

For my charging needs, I bring along with me an Anker power bank, this one to be precise. I had just gotten it in late November 2025 and have had no issue with it whatsoever, plus I like that it has two built-in USB-C cods too. My Galaxy 23 Ultra’s battery has also given me no issue at all so far even though I bought it all the way back in June 2023. It still holds a charge well, and doesn’t even have any cord connection problems or anything.

But then I found that my phone, which was at 18%, would not charge at all when I plugged it into the Anker battery. I tried four different cords, the two built-in ones, a newish USB A-C one that I had, and an old USB C-C one that I have used as my main cord for years and years. Love this thing. I’m leaving myself a mental note here, which I will hopefully find when reviewing my blog once I get home, to go look and see if I can find what cord this originally was and where it was from, since it’s served me so well. It might actually be back from before when I started keeping meticulous records though.

I was in a bit of a panic here, largely because it’s hard to function in China without a phone, especially since every sort of payment seems to run off of Weixin/WeChat or Alipay. And good luck ordering a Didi without a phone. Thankfully I was not very far from my hotel nonetheless, but even then I’d still be partially stuck without a phone, even with a laptop and internet connection. For now, my food hadn’t actually arrived yet, so I put the phone on power conservation mode, tried to jiggle the cord to see if it would connect at certain angles or not, and then also consulted Gemini, who had me try resetting the phone’s USB cache and then powering the thing off and on. Nope, no dice at all. Gemini told me to go visit the nearest Samsung outlet after lunch, which was in another mall neaby called IMIX Park, on the other side of my hotel. I verified this, then turned off the phone to save battery.

I did notice though, when the phone was off, that the power bank and phone would do a little dance where it would connect, then disconnect again after half a second, then connect again, then disconnect again, over and over. I had no idea what this meant and my phone was off so I didn’t want to power it on again to do research, but this actually got its charge, which was down to 12% at that point, up to 19% again. It made me uncomfortable to see though because it was probably hurting some sort of electronic circuit inside either the phone or the power bank, and might make things worse, so I disconnected even that after a while.

This made my lunch not taste very good at all, at any rate, and I hurried through the rather dry meal before setting off toward IMIX Mall. I had my phone back on at this point so that I could make sure I knew the Chinese words for “phone”, “battery”, “not charging”, and “help me please I will give you my firstborn”, and I took a picture of a semi-covered passage leading around the side of the mall towards the front of it:

And the entrance to the mall itself that I used:

I found the Samsung Experience store, and approached the only person in the store, a guy in a company T-shirt that was doing something on his phone as I explained to him my problem. He held up a hand and said that they didn’t do repairs or diagnosis here. In fact, there were no official Samsung repair facilities in the entirety of Jiangmen at all, he said. I would have to go find a third-party technician.

I mentally cussed him out but asked him where I could find one, and he mumbled something about the basement before going back to his phone again, obviously more interested in whatever he was doing than in helping me troubleshoot his company’s phone. I looked for likely shops that might sell those wireless Qi-charging devices for the phone as well, and was about to ask Gemini for help in locating stores that might sell it, when I found this booth:

Well, that second word says repair, so with my soul being lightly drizzled on like the city of Jiangmen this afternoon, I approached the girl at the counter to ask if they did phone repairs.

She looked at my phone, then puzzled her way through my English menu to get to the settings. She plugged it into one of those multiple power bank devices that she had, tapped some stuff on her phone, then looked at my own power bank so I offered her that too, showing her the disconnection/reconnection that was surely the sign that the battery or the USB connection of the phone was toasted.

Instead, she shook her head, and showed me that the charging on the device when plugged into her gadget was all fine. Oh. The issue turned out to be my Anker power bank after all, which was still a $200 problem but was still under warranty and at least did not involve phone surgery in a distant land. Thanking her for saving my trip, I walked back to the hotel to see if plugging it into the wall would work, and to get my other Anker power bank (same brand, equally heavy, but different model) instead.

On the way back though, Gemini analyzed what was going on and told me that it could actually just be a “Power Delivery handshake failure or an overcurrent protection loop.” Uh, thanks. But more importantly, it suggested that I should try a reset of the power bank itself by taking one of the USB cords (I used one of the built-in ones) and plugging it into itself, creating a loop. Upon doing tihs, the power bank blinked in confusion, and its battery display then gave me a stupid little smileyface. After this, the power bank started working again, and could even supercharge my phone just fine! Interesting. All that time and bother and it was just that the portable Anker battery had been stuck and needed a reset. I didn’t even know I could reset those things outside of letting them drain down to 0%.

It was past 4 pm at this point, and I just wanted something nearby to spend the rest of my time on, so I looked up a supermarket in a shopping mall nearby and headed that way. The one I picked was actually almost a kilometer away, but it was a nice scenic walk along the bank of a river to get there.

I enjoyed looking at these buildings and their second storey balconies or perhaps shared terrace, I’m not really sure which, from below.

This mall that I went to was called Kinmai Plaza:

I explored all of its 5 or so levels and found things like this billiards room space with anthropomorphized billiard balls:

An indoor fountain by the food area with a popup boutique pet shop that sold purebred cats or something next to it:

A picture of said food court, with not many patrons between lunch and dinner, but those faded lines on the fllor remind me of a zebra crossing:

A bunch of restaurant staff lining up assumedly outside their shop in a military formation, listening to their chef-general give them a pre-dinner shift pep talk.

An eerily quiet top floor, which featured a cinema area and some really swanky-looking restaurants:

I also took a few pictures of the really weird clothing name stores that one can find in China. Like this one, Biemlfdlkk, which apparently has its own Wikipedia page.

And another one, Marisfrolg, which actually apparently even has a Singapore store.

I’ve just never noticed it. Here’s Another One.

There are a few international brands I’ve seen, like Zara and Uniqlo, but in general it’s so neat to see tons of different stores that I’d never see back home, and also weird to see some of the more unpronouncable ones.

But I was here for the supermarket, and this one was located in a weird place, on the second floor of the building, right in front of one of the escalators leading up!

I walked around here a long, long time, a bit over an hour all in all, just looking at and smelling stuff and running pictures of things by Gemini to figure out what stuff was local and regional and what stuff was generic nationwide brands.

This store even had actual loose leaves of tea that you could scoop up and put into a bag!

And meat stalls selling Aardvark! Aardvark meat!

(I’m pretty sure that’s just a translation error, as was Gemini — 土猪 means native/local pig, and not aardvark. But we’ll pretend it was actual aardvark meat when it comes time to write the screenplay’s script.)

I ended up buying some specialty tea from the region:

Some milk to bring back to my hotel — I plan to bring those bottles all the way home, since they’re small, and especially since one of them says leechee instead of lychee:

And some noodles and stuff that eventually became my dinner that evening and breakfast the next morning:

The things in the bowl on the right were succulent little beef buns from this shop outside the mall:

In general, I’ve eaten a lot of eatery and restaurant food but have not really tried much from the supermarkets and the general snack stores. I wanted to try that, especially since I was exhausted from not sleeping (much) the night before and after that little bit of excitement with the phone and the power bank. So I wanted to give myself a quiet, decadent meal back at the hotel instead. It’s too bad at this kitchenette area doesn’t have a stove or a microwave though or I’d make soup and rice too.

Anyway, my walk home was uneventful, and took me past this nice walkway between IMIX Mall, where I had been earlier to fix my phone issue, and Sunday Plaza, a mall right adjacent to it.

I also saw an absolutely adorable giant inflated rocking horse that was wet from the rain:

And my very first Lawson to go with the three or four 7-Eleven’s that I’ve seen up until now.

Gemini has been incredibly useful this trip, and one of the things it does well is that I can feed it a picture, like the pop-up pet boutique or the staff members lining up in front of the chef earlier, and it will seemingly accurately give me the context behind what’s happening. Even if it isn’t 100% correct, it still gets me most of the way there. Another example was on the way home, when I asked it about this medicine shop:

I don’t know much about this kind of stuff at all, and it was neat to see a spiel about the kind of shop it was, how expensive some of the ingredients are, and how and why that giant ginseng in the shop window is probably worth a small fortune. Gives lots of context that I can’t always verify, but that I don’t always NEED to verify, either. Basically a walking tour guide that can sometimes help with diagnosing battery issues.

I had dinner and did my laundry and then collapsed into bed — I fell asleep much earlier than I intended and ended up sleeping 8-9 hours all in all, which put a dent into the next day’s schedule but also left me feeling quite refreshed. Until next time!