I woke up with more aches in my stomach that absolutely annihilated a good dream that I knew I had but was disappointed to lose again, like ethereal Chenpi tea leaves (the local specialty) falling through my fingers one more time. Oh well. At least the aches subsided over time as the day went on, and finally were vanquished for good thanks to some Po Chai Pills that my sister provided me with at the end of the evening. This is a note to my future self to get some of those when I get home. I’ve forgotten that they existed over the years.

Today was pack up and get the heck out of my makeshift hospital room day, but due to bathroom emergencies I was up at around 6 am and then meandering around, enjoying a restful day while slowly packing. At least if you don’t count Meituan locking me out of their account yet again when I was trying to make yet another online order. And I raged (not at her) when the Xiaomei representative that I spoke to this time said that all she could do was to forward on the issue to the network team and that she was sorry.

Half the customer service representatives for Meituan (plus their entire “security” system) are terrible at their job and the other half seem to be decent, in my experience, but I had no more energy to fight with them and went to install Alipay to try to use their food delivery service, Ele.me or however they call it, instead, but even though I validated my identity there and linked my card and everything, that also failed to work due to some issue with logging into Alipay’s one click system. When I tried to open a ticket to troubleshoot there, I was directed to “fix” it by the Alipay rep by following a series of screenshot steps that ended up pointing me toward opening a support session with the Taobao Flash Sale app team or something. I rage quit at that point though.

Also, talking about rage quitting, Virgin Mobile also ate my ire today. After my comment two days ago that I had not received any calls, including spam calls, in a while, it seems like Virgin Mobile has some sort of privacy-spying tool, as suddenly, after I picked up the phone from the Meituan rep from the China phone number on my Telus overseas roaming plan two days ago , suddenly the Virgin Mobile reps were all over my number again, trying desperately to get in touch with me to get me to switch back away from my new Telus plan and back to them — something I had already told them no to in the past. Those parasites just won’t take no for an answer.

As you can see in the above shot of my phone log, I had not received any phone calls since Feb 19 at all, and in fact nothing from Canada since before I had left the country on Feb 07. The Feb 19 one was a Singapore call from a friend. The +86 514 one was the Meituan rep, and the +86 186 one was one I knew about and wasn’t a spam call but one I didn’t care to pick up to try to save on roaming charges.

But after the +86 514 one landed? The next day, immediately rapidfire calls from the Virgin Vermin, 2:37 am, 5:08 am, 7:32 am, which translate to working hours in North American time zones. Then again the next day, 1:19 am, 5:03 am..

I blocked their 866-923-9072 Virgin Plus number permanently after the 1:19 am call, since I “accidentally” picked up on that call, which probably means another day’s wotrh of roaming charges thanks to them (I actually went to text call without thinking instead of hanging up before realizing that that was probably the same thing as picking up). so they would have discovered the block during their 5:03 call. So what happens? Suddenly an 8:16 am call from a different local number!

At this point they could give me a phone plan for free and I would still not sign up for Virgin Mobile again.

Anyway, back to the day itself. The hotel checkout was at noon, but I received a note that in return for a 5-star rating on trip.com, they would let guests check out at 2 pm instead. I didn’t need that much time though, since I now had to go out for food anyway, and I don’t like that kind of sketchy stuff (though I did eventually give them a 5-star rating independent of that anyway) so I packed up and checked out at 11:30 am, leaving my suitcase and my backpack in the lobby itself while taking my sling bag with me for the day’s adventures. I also bribed the front desk staff with that sealed bowl of instant noodles I bought three days ago but never had the appetite to eat, and it was too bulky for me to want to bring over to Guangzhou I went down to the lobby and took a Didi to finish up some unfinished business from three days ago.

Three days ago, before I got sick, my last scouting mission was to Pengjiang Xingfuli, and I mentioned that there was a second, larger mall with an Aeon sign on the side of the wall next to it, pretty much attached to it. That mall was Jiangmen Lihe, or Lihe Plaza, and that’s where I went today.

A bunch of giant ducks welcomed my return to the outside world. I was glad to be out again and about again, even if I was a bit confused about their flock name. It’s apparently B.Duck City Funs, but it could just have as easily read Boduck Cityfurs for all I know.

But names are difficult in China. I mentioned a bunch of names for the mall in the blog three days ago, and I found one more later on here as well, Lihe Commercial Center. This puzzled me a bit but I think that’s actually the new name for the combined set of two shopping centres and maybe the attached hotels or office buildings or whatever next to them now? I annotated the below picture with red lines to show the two malls that I had visited though, Lihe Plaza today and Pengjiang Xingfuli three days ago, just to show the skinship between them. And this whole thing, I -think-, used to be the Yihua Department Store.

The inside of the mall looked like this. It was a 5 storey mall, kinda.

There was a pop-up Doraemon store on the right that was there from sometime in February until March 10. Not a franchise I care for (at the moment) unfortunately, but nonetheless, its temporary existence was noted.

And on the left, a big ceremonial peacock, and an escalator leading down into an Aeon supermarket for future reference.

I was a bit nervous about lunch as I was still carrying around quite a bit of gastric air at this point, but with Gemini‘s help in scanning menus and looking for healthy, recovery-friendly food, I eventually settled on this Tomato and Egg Noodles dish from a store called Laowanhui. It was acceptable. Much better than saltine crackers and plain mantao and rejected Meituan tears.

Most importantly, it seemed to stay down, and i was glad about that. I finished all the food and all the noodles but not all of the broth.

I then went around the mall to survey the stores after that. My favourite store in the mall turned out to be this bookshop that I found early on, on the far western side of the second level of the mall.

It was laid out in a really intriguing way, with most of the books on display on lit alcoves lining the sides of a long passage.

There were little side doorways that led into rooms that sold specialty items, like this side room that sold gifts and games:

And this one for a crafts section (where you could even handmake something to take home, I think).

And there were a couple others too that I didn’t take pictures of, I think one had some plushies and maybe clothes, and another one had revision material for children, or something like that. In the games section, I also found this gem:

I know that game! It’s luzhanqi/army chess, but a solid board version (I’d only seen paper board versions) that doesn’t require a third person to be a judge! That’s neat! And waaaay too big to bring home in my suitcase and expensive to boot. But, still, very, neat!

There was also a message board full of sticker notes by the front door that required two semi closeup shots to get the top half and bottom half captured in a semi readable state.

The rest of the mall was okay. The top levels were largely restaurants as always, with most of them being concentrated on level 4.

There were interesting stores and other things mixed in, like this “VR World” thing with games and rides.. er “experiences”. I have no idea how some of these things like this simulated ride thing could ever be profitable.

But I guess I’m not the targetted audience. There was also a really shiny and really loud arcade with random English quotes used as weird taglines for their storefront but that were all also promptly hidden behind the actul storefront signs.

This tiger, whose butt one could pat. C’mere, Tigey.

This escalator was supposed to go up to a secret 6th floor with a Sky Garden, but it was sealed off and guarded by a ton of.. panda plushies? I fed Gemini this picture and for the rest of my afternoon it kept talking about the bank-sponsored pandas who were preventing Tigey‘s takeover of the world. Gemini was hilarious today.

One of the restaurants focused on mushrooms and had a display outside their store that I found neat since I like mushrooms too.

There was a random go-kart track on the top floor:

As well as an.. ice rink?… with plastic seals… that one could sit their child on and then push them around the ice on?!? Who comes up with these ideas???

On the third level, on either side of the main atrium balcony and facing away from each other, were two competing temporary bank stalls which were trying to lure people into signing up for their credit cards by displaying the wealth that they could obtain in terms of physical goods on display. It was very red-team-vs-blue-team and was extra notable for me at first because nobody was there at either booth when I first went by. Later on just before I left the mall, I swung by the place again and both booths now were manned with two people each.

While I was making my way through the food sections and collecting even more menu pamphlets for my stash, I saw that two of the restaurants/food shops in particular had huge queues for some reason. One was Sushiro:

And the other was this store, 芋田田, or Taro Land. I couldn’t find out much about the store but they were having a grand opening of some kind and boy was the queue long.

One of the female attendants must have put a promotional signpost for the shop opening down the back of a male colleague’s shirt while she took a break or something, and here she is retrieving it heh.

Then it was time for the supermarket! Aeon Supermarket, owned by a Japanese company that’s apparently turning 100 years old later this year, was distinctly different from many of the Chinese ones that I had visited thus far. No piles of nice-smelling herbs and seasonings, for once. And their shelf layout was far more Western.

Labelled aisles! Amazing! Most Chinese supermarkets don’t do that for some inexplicable reason. One I went to didn’t even label their shelves, every shelf was just labelled with a positive outlook sort of phrase on it. Some of the aisles here did cater specifically to Japanese products, too.

They had separate unmanned shop sections for things like clothes and toys, this was similar to the other Chinese supermarkets too though the division here was more stark, and in the Chinese one these categories tended to blend into each other and into larger household goods sections of the supermarket/hypermarket which did not exist here. The Chinese supermarkets instead have more stark divisions between the main supermarket and other manned side stalls that sell things like wine and local specialties, here in Aeon that didn’t exist that I saw except for a small counter selling cigarettes.

In the produce section, there were some loose items like fruits lying in racks:

But almost everything else, vegetables AND meats, were wrapped up!

Surprise surprise, I didn’t remember seeing any houseflies or such buzzing around while here, whereas they’re a mildly common sight at the other Chinese supermarkets, since they assume you wash the exposed vegetables and dried meat before using them.

There was a deli and a prepared food section too:

Like in Japanese suparmarkets, some of the fresh food was getting discounted, but they did not use either the Japanese word for discounts (引) nor the Chinese one (折) but just straight up slapped the final price on the sticker.

It was a neat change of pace. I bought some pocari sweat powder that I could turn into electrolyte juice at my leisure, and a bottle of “100% NFC” coconut juice, which Gemini told me meant Not From Concentrate, or direct from fruit only. That one just tasted like fancy water though, but the bot swore it was healthy and a great choice to have with my final pack of saltine crackers, so I sat down to have those back on the fifth level, next to that army of escalator pandas, before leaving the mall. As I left the mall, I noted that the escalator wedge guards/ triangular warning signs were all printed on the reverse side of the sign that they were supposed to be on. What a weird mistake. All of them on the couple of escalators that I saw after first noticing the error were like that. I wonder how many people have picked up on that.

At this point, it was a little past 4:10 pm, and my train ride to Guangzhou, on train C6918, was at 6:53 pm. Excuse the sidebar popup on this archival screenshot.

I felt it was still a bit too early to go to the station, but I had nothing else to do anyway, so I took my time walking out, ordering a Didi back to my hotel (the C+ Hotel (Jiangmen Pengjiang Wanda Plaza), which is not actually in the Wanda Plaza, and whose Didi location is better found using the other “hotel” in the same building, the One Carat Hotel), to retrieve my bags. I then had to order a second ride to the Jiangmen East station itself, which was significantly further away and took significantly longer to find a ride for. But eventually it worked, and off I went.

Dodging the pesky “black taxi” drivers hovering around the entrances, who were trying to give me a ride to wherever I want to go even though I had obviously just arrived here with luggage to take the train, I entered the station.

To my surprise, THIS baggage scan required me to separate out my liquids and batteries into a different bin:

The one at Zhanjiang a few days ago had not, and did not give any of my stuff a second look except for one of my water bottles, so this caught me off guard as one of my power banks was buried in my large suitcase under lock and key. The other one was in my sling bag. I produced that one and the water bottles and shoved everything through, but the scanner found the one in the large bag anyway (they actually said they found two, but I said there was only one — that was true and I’m not really sure what they located as the second, but they didn’t fight me on that front). So I had to take out that other one too. The security staff lady took a magnifying glass out to look at both, proclaimed them to be ok, and returned them to me.

So even though the Jiangmen East station was tiny, and even the Zhanjiang West one had been twice as large, by the time I settled in to the seats to wait for the ticket gates to open, it was already 5:51 pm. By the way, I would like to interject here to point out another seriously good way to use Gemini, which is that I saw someone else mention to put in a Personal Context command to say something like, “Always add the date and time to the start of every reply. Format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS”.

At least, that’s the format I like so that’s what I use. The irritation that caused this is that currently neither the Gemini app nor website seems to have a built-in way to show me when an old message was sent, either by me or the bot, so the solution makes the bot prepend every reply with a timestamp instead. But I do like this a lot, because now this gives me a much cleaner way to track when major events happen and why I want a “bookmark” for that specific event. The other way I had been doing this was to take a random photo and using that photo’s metadata timestamp, but sometimes there isn’t any context behind the photo and by the time I go back and review it, there are a bunch of weird, multicoloured question mark symbols floating above my head.

Anyway, the signboard said the ticket gates would open 12 minutes before departure and close 3 minutes before, so that would be 6:41 to 6:50 pm for my 6:53 pm ride, but apparently they did expect a lot of people for this ride and knew that that was potentially not enough to get everyone onto the platforms, so they actually opened the gate much, much earlier than that — a little after 6:15 pm, to be slightly imprecise. So I had only settled down for about 25 minutes before it was time to go already! In fact, they let us in before they let the passengers from the train that would arrive at the station BEFORE our train in, hah, although we were headed to different platforms anyway.

It turned out there was a second waiting area past the ticket gates and before the platforms though, with most of the seats specifically around the stairs, escalators, and elevator to the platform where our train was going, and all three of those were still locked, so we had to wait -there- until about 12 minutes before the train arrived before we were allowed onto the platform.

The train itself was extremely crowded, with plenty of people standing up. My ticket came with a window seat so I took it, and a kind conductor found a place for my large luggage bag behind someone who was standing in an aisle, and it was all sort of cozy, but I was glad that this was just a short trip. Especially since the guy beside me was playing some shooting mobile game on his phone with the volume set on low but still very much audible to everyone around him.

Soon enough, we rolled into Guangzhou South Station. It was soooo crowded. And so massive.

Even though I’d been here and explored part of it before, I was still impressed by how large and cavernous it was. It easily rivals the largest stations in Japan that I’ve been to, Kyoto Station and Shinjuku Station, though I’m not sure it’s larger than the latter. Hard to tell though since there’s a lot of stuff added on to stations as well like underground malls and carparks and such. Guangzhou South had 8 carparks/parkades (marked P1-P8) and Kel directed me to go get a Didi ride from P1, which I did.

That was the list of people just waiting there alone though, and she suggested that I get a Premium ride, which would be quicker and smoother and also not jump the queue because Premium cars don’t pick up regular passengers anyway. The price of a Premium car was also discounted so that it was pretty much the same price as a regular car for me for some reason, so that was a no-brainer, since I wanted to spend more time chatting with Kel before she went to bed.

I still had to wait for the car to navigate its way through the traffic to get to me, but soon enough the ride was here and I was off! The driver was not overly chatty, but he was friendly and funny when we did chat, and I ended up giving him my fourth postcard of the trip once we finally reached Kel‘s place and I disembarked from the car and he had helped me disembark my heavy luggage bag too. That postcard went to Mr. Yu of 粤ABN3869. Thanks for the ride (but also thanks for not telling me that the bottle of water in the holder net to me was actually complimentary and for me, even though I told you this was the first time I had taken a Didi here in Guangzhou! Still, Kel had told me about it, I just hadn’t bothered to take it and was wondering.)

And finally, a little after 8:30 pm, we reached Kel‘s place! Tigey was glad to see her plushies again and re-annexed them all while Kel and I sat down to chat after cleaning my suitcase and opening things to make sure nothing was damaged. She ordered dinner for me too, a bowl of stir-fried beef rice noodles that actually turned out to be really great, and I paid for it using a shared payment system that Meituan/WeChat had that I wanted to try out. It worked and they even gave us a special physical coupon for using it. Interesting! More stuff to scan!

We spent about three hours chatting and catching up before she went to bed, and I followed suit soon after despite wanting to stay up and work on the blog a little. That definitely did not happen. Her mattress was as rock-hard as I remember and I was out cold the moment my head hit the pillow. Well, that’s not completely true, I survived about half an hour longer melting in the familiar warmth of the room before I succumbed, but close enough.