I made a pretty neat discovery while dithering around on my laptop at the start of the day. So I knew that my Shanghai to Tokyo flight on the 19th comes with a 30 kg baggage limit, since I purposely bought it that way only a couple of weeks ago. However, I thought that my return ANA flight from Tokyo to Edmonton just came with one 20 kg bag for some reason, and I was ready to pay an overcharge on this. Instead, it actually comes with two 23 kg bags worth of space. I cannot combine that into one giant 40+ kg one, sadly, even though they say that the maximum allowable weight is 45 kg.

However, this means that as long as things can compress into one bag and stay under 30 kg, I can bring all that to Tokyo and then split it into two bags and get it home under already prepaid fees, without having to pay any extra fees at all. Woo. I’ll just need to pick up a second bag of some sort to check in.

As this was Sunday, and Kel‘s only off day this week, she took the chance to sleep in late and I took that chance to do a bunch of my blogging work. Once she got up, she then started a video call with Dad and Mom as well, which we both participated in, and then after that was done we called up Jon and had a roundtable update on the state of our parents’ health as well, particularly Mom‘s. This was good for the soul and a lot of fun. However, it also meant that by the time we were ready to go out, it was past 4 pm and neither of us had had lunch yet.

We left the building and went literally downstairs for lunch, though we had to dodge a pushy gym salesperson who I tried to take a flyer for and then had to give him my WeChat info for before he would let me go. I blocked him later on once we put sufficient distance between us. We had lunch at a store called Mita Rice Rolls, which, oddly enough, sold rice rolls.

They look better on paper than they do in person though. This was the one in the bottom left, their specialty salted duck and egg yolk rice roll.

Despite its size it was packed with stuff because everything was rolled up and compressed together, but I didn’t really find it to have much of a personality taste-wise in the end. There were a bunch of competing tastes but nothing “won” and nothing else took on a supporting roll.. er role instead. I would have preferred some sort of meat to be the star of the show taste-wise and then everything else enhancing it. But it was not bad at all.

Kel then stopped by a store called Jo’s Cha and showed me their drinks and promotion. Kind of similarly to Linlee, this store also gives away a little trinket per tea drink someone buys from them, in this case a mahjong tile! We requisitioned two drinks and sat at a table where two other people had already finished and left their drinks for discarding without taking their mahjong tiles. So we ended up with four in total from this trip. I ordered bitter melon with lemon tea, which tasted strange but decent as long as I didn’t actually suck up any of the actual bitter melon inside through the straw. And the tile that I ended up with for my first ever Jo’s Cha mahjong tile was the 9 of bamboos.

Yes Tigey, that’s yours now. Like everything else. Kel and I then took a Didi to a park something like 40 minutes to the north — Guangzhou is huge, and spread out, and there’s vast parts of the city that even she’s never been to after having lived a couple of years here. We went to a park called Tianhe Park:

It was nice, but very busy, though that was probably due to it being a pleasant Saturday afternoon. We were looking for something specific in here though, and we soon found it — there was a specific event called a Marriage Market here. Basically, people — often parents, and sometimes without knowledge by their children — would come here with printed particulars of their own or their kid’s own personal details, and try to find them a blind date match with someone else in an attempt to find them someone to marry. It’s like a market for single people. We had no idea what to expect, but it turned out to look like this.

So people would hang up those papers (or prop them on an umbrella) and then either wait for someone to show interest, or walk around looking for other matching sheets of interest. For themselves, for their kid, or from what it looked like, sometimes even for their clients? A few people had a pile of different ones that they listed out in front of them on the floor.

There were also some people who were quite obviously there to shop themselves too. A couple of guys dressed quite smartly and talking to potential girlfriends and/or parents, a girl perched on the floor in front of her father and drawing someone to showcase her art skill, and so on.

All super interesting! Everything took place in a small square plaza, maybe around 20m by 20m or so. But we weren’t there to shop for ourselves, so we hurried out of there bevfore Tigey got hit on.

We walked back out through the front of the park by where we had entered again, pausing long enough for me to take another picture of the same place from a different angle. There were people playing badminton, kids pushing around big balloons, bicycles and tricycles rushing by, I really liked the vibe.

We started walking from the park towards the station, but got distracted by a shopping centre that looked like this:

This was the Dongfang Duhui Plaza, or Eastern Metro Plaza. It honestly wasn’t much to sneeze at with just a bunch of first-level shops pointing towards the street, and two escalators leading up that both were not operational. They still functioned as stairs though, and we went upstairs to have a peek.

Hmm, not much here. We followed the passage to the right instead:

And then saw that the gate leading up the stairs was unlocked. We did hesitate here a bit but I decided we should check it out in the end, and just past that turn in the stairs and the second staircase leading up, we ended up here:

Cool, a community flower garden! This was probably technically a semi-private space, but another set of stairs behind us which was locked, as well as a corridor to the right of the flowers which was supposed to be locked but was being kept open for airflow, led to the actual housing units around here. We didn’t go that far, we just enjoyed the third floor rooftop garden for a minute or two. Looking down, I was also intrigued by the view we had:

We were looking right onto the school grounds of an elementary/primary school, Tianfu Road Primary School (天府路小学). It really struck me how close we were, how intimate the residential buildings surrounding the school were with the school itself. A worried grandparent with nothing better to do could just sit around here and watch her kids in school all day! Or toss them a lunch bag! Or hold up signs with exam answers! Okay maybe not that one.

We then went back down and crossed over to the adjacent mall, a slightly larger one called Oriental New World Plaza (东方新世界广场). It was full of restaurants on the bottom two floors, a tutoring centre or something on the third floor, and a billiards room and some small, random shops on the fourth floor. This mall wasn’t as spatially interesting as the other one, except that it had an elevator whose ground floor stop was not connected to the rest of the mall and was just a conduit out onto the street.

I did need to note down the mall name since I took a few menu pamphlets here, but I didn’t take many pictures of the inside itself. There was this cat cafe though, for one.

And this Buddhist set up on the third floor:

And a billiards room on the top floor:

Outside that billiards room was this signboard (on the right of the following picture):

Apparently what’s happening is that, even though most of the people I see playing billiards with have been male, here one could “hire” a girl to play billiards with them. And they all had gaming credentials of their own too, like they were probably as good as or better than the guys they were going to be playing with. I was both horrified and impressed at the same time. I also noted that the signboard had plenty more space around it to add other names, there just weren’t any — ten was about how many they could afford to keep on the payroll.

We left and took a very busy railway network to our next location, which was one stop, a transfer, and then three more stops away from where we were. I hadn’t brought my Guangzhou Metro card along though, so with Kel‘s help I set up my Alipay virtual card on my phone and used that instead. It worked flawlessly.

Out on the other side, we left Tiyu Xilu Station and emerged into a neighbourhood that looked like this:

This was, as far as I could tell, a large, chic neighbourhood called Tianhe South, filled with things like boutique shops and restaurants tucked away below residential buildings. It was such a fascinating place with fascinating scenes. Here’s a leashed cat and a female passerby playing with it:

The streets eventually led to one larger, central, main street in the area. This place was wide open and there were plenty of people, young and old, out enjoying the evening air. Here’s a left, front, and right view of the street where we turned into it, with the light show in the third picture being from the Canton Tower in the far distance.

Canton Tower (or Guangzhou Tower) just so happened (*hand-waving gesture*) to be due south of this street, so this street runs north-south and we walked into it from the west.

I also liked the guy who was fast asleep in his very precarious spot in the second picture. I went closer for a sneaky close-up picture of him. His front motorcycle wheel wasn’t even touching the ground.

I took over the exploration from here and we checked out some of the side alleys linked to this main street. One of them featured a cocktail bar called ALONE with a heavy stray cat focus.

In fact, there was what basically was a little cat shrine in the grassy park area directly outside the store, with bowls and areas to perch set up for the stray cats in the neighbourhood. As such, a bunch of cats had congregated there and stared at me and others as we went by.

Other things that we ran into in the next half an hour or so here included rentable strollers in the shape of vehicles:

A chinchilla shop referencing My Neighbour Totoro:

And a row of lanterns lighting a back alley connecting a couple of different streets.

It was fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the way the chic boutiques and stuff coexisted beside perfectly normal, slightly aged apartment complexes. I enjoyed looking up and wondering about the people that lived in the buildings and what they thought about the roads below (and the constant honking of stupid Meituan motorcycles going by.)

But although Kel was eager to show me this place, this still also was a sideshow compared to the main mall that we were supposed to go to. This was Grandview Mall, one of three separate malls side by side with each other. We never had time to go visit the other two, but they apparently  both had as large a footprint as this one, more or less. This was apparently the more exotic one that I had to see though.

Grandview Mall was roughly 7 storeys high with 2 more storeys underground, and I took quite a few pictures of the central atrium from different angles as the evening went on. I’ve collated a couple of the better ones here, in order of timestamp:

And then a couple more liminal ones from after closing time, before we left the actual mall, for good measure.

There was a smaller side wing/back wing to the mall as well, which had a couple of nice walkways of its own.

The 4th level had a safari display going some of the way around the atrium walkway on that level, showing a stampede of safari animals running by. Definitely a commentary on the number of people in that mall flowing by as well.

And as can be seen in some of the general pictures above, there was a miniature lantern festival going on on the 4th level as well.

While we headed up the mall towards the top level, we stopped by a The Green Party store where I actually ended up picking up an anime blind box for a refrigerator magnet for the City the Animation show. I’d never seen any merch for that show up until that point, and it was the last one in its box, so that seemed like a sign.

That was 19 yuan, or $3.73 CAD. I stuck it on Kel‘s fridge for now, I’m not sure she noticed. I’m not sure I’ll remember to take it either, though. The other place I bought an item from was a miHoyo pop-up store or something just outside a shop caled X-Gather. The store looked like this:

And they were packing up their things on the very last day of the store’s existence. Oops. A lot of the shelves were already empty, whether packed up or sold out I don’t know for sure, but there was still something that caught my eye instantly and that I bought without too much hesitation — a Bangboo plushie from Zenless Zone Zero.

How cute! He cost 68 CNY, or $13.49 CAD. I like him a ton.

But the main reason Kel had wanted to take me here was to show me the various uh.. facilities that this mall actually housed. It housed two or three different museums, a rainforest display, an aquarium, a planetarium, at least one arcade if not two, a penguin pond, and more. It was like an amusement park, at least if one ignores the fact that amusement parks tend not to have museums of natural science. Here’s a few pictures showing some of the entrances and free displays, as we did not pay any money to go into any of them. We didn’t have the time, even if we wanted to.

The tiger on the right of the toucan here was slowly moving around in a non-menacing fashion. So was the human to the right of the tiger.

Here’s someone getting up after spilling himself over on an ice rink, his misfortune captured forever on a historical blog.

Here’s a horse-racing thing as part of an arcade — but the more interesting thing captured in the photo are four employees on the right seemingly being chewed out by their supervisor.

Here’s an ice area and then a 10x zoom on a father (and her daughter, not pictured) enjoying the sight of penguins on the 7th level of a mall, far away from their native habitat.

Also on that level was an ice rink with a.. sled-like thing that one could use to push someone else around on the ice with. Or themselves, I guess.

I was also very happy to find that unlike many museums, these ones had brochures and were cross-promoting each other too, so I picked up a good number of pretty brochures printed on nice stock from here for my collection and eventual archiving. And I thank Kel for showing me this and for sticking around with me as I went around collecting them. Even though they cross-promoted, not every museum or display had brochures for every other attraction so I still went to four or five different ones to try to make sure I had collected them all.

Finally, it was time for a very late dinner. We took the elevator down to the bottom floor and eventually settled on a rotating hotpot store called Shengxiangting Rotating Hotpot. Kel had actually not eaten at one of these before, at least not the hotpot version, and although there was a queue to get in, we took a number and waited for it in the end anyway because the other store wandered to, and that we were considering eating at, told us that they had already taken last order for the night and were not accepting any more patrons. So back to the hotpot store we went.

This hotpot store was cleaner and cheaper than the last one I went to, and it had a lower conveyor belt of bowls going by as well as a higher open area where a wheeled robotic device would come by with any meat dish that was ordered from the kitchen directly.

At about halfway through our meal, in preparation for closing down, the store employees also issued a buy one get one sale with the remaining dishes, stacking them all on tables and letting patrons pick what they wanted for a discount. That was neat.

Each coloured bowl was worth a different number of yuan — 3 for yellow, 5 for red, and 7 for brown, but for the buy one get one free sale we’d take two bowls of the same colour and bring it to the staff member who was minding the sale, and she’d pour one of them into a paper bowl and take that coloured bowl away so that we’d have one less bowl on our bill at the end.

We did still have quite a bit on our bill at the end, though! It was a satisfying meal, and Kel ended up paying for all of it again. Thanks Kel! It was 199 yuan, so very close to $40 CAD, and we actually tried a couple of ways to split it but it didn’t work due to WeChat restrictions for transferring money. Oh well.

Most of the rest of the evening was uneventful — we reached home very late since Clifford Wonderland was very far away from Grandview Mall, so Kel took a shower and then went right to bed. I followed suit with the shower right after, but the bathroom drain overflowed, causing a mess that I then went to (partially and inexpertly) clean up as best as I could. Kel had to deal with the rest of that the following evening once she returned from work. She has no idea why it does that now and then but is moving out of here in three months anyway, so it’s never going to get resolved, just mitigated with drain cleaner liquid.