Thursday found me getting all my affairs in order — lots of rest, blog all caught up, and mentally getting ready for leaving Kel‘s place in a couple of days, iterating what I need to bring with me and what I still need to do (like book my hotels) etc.

This is also the last time i’ll be in this apartment and probably this area of Guangzhou even if I return here, since Kel accepted a different teaching job elsewhere and will be moving in a couple of months. I don’t know about her but I probably won’t miss this place, haha. With its terrible bathroom drains, paper-thin walls and ceilings, alleged occasional cockroaches, overly difficult elevator, and rock-hard mattresses. Still, it’s a home for her and a safe haven for me on two of my trips now, so I appreciate the time that I have spent here. And the money saved.

I left the aparment pretty late today, and ended up taking a Didi at around 3 pm to Beijing Road, a north-south road in the central part of Guangzhou, slightly north of Haizhu district, which consists of two horizontal rivers that cut across Guangzhou. We are staying in Panyu district, which is to the south, so just to get to the southern end of Beijing Road took my Didi ride about 50 minutes to get there, so it was almost 4 pm before we arrived. On the other side of the evening, Kel came home at about 7 pm and I started making my way home from Beijing Road at that time, which basically meant that I found a road near the edge of the region that wasn’t chock-full of traffic and pedestrians, and caught another 50 minute or so ride home.

So, this gave me a four hour window in which to explore Beijing Road today. But while I am aware that there are certain temples, memorial halls, and other landmarks further north along Beijing Road that I don’t want to directly name because I do search through my blog to see if I’ve visited a place on a previous trip and so don’t want to pollute my search results for a hypothetical future trip back here, I never visited any of those landmarks and basically spent the day bumming around the southern side of the region, exploring and walking wherever my feet took me. I don’t tend to go for tourist attractions anyway, since I find what I like is usually different from others — Instagrammable locations usually do nothing for me other than a brief “That’s cool”. But be warned that I’m usually the type of tourist that goes somewhere and then ignores all the main attractions there, and so that’s where this blog post is headed today.

So, after a pleasant ride with a new Didi driver (he only had 458 trips under his belt) named Mr Guo of licence plate 粤AEV4378 in which I left him with an Edmonton postcard for being friendly and funny and being able to speak a tiny bit of English, my exploration afternoon began when I got dropped off at the southern end of Beijing Road, right across a store called The First Noodle (Beijing Road) on Didi’s map selection. This actually put me right next to an Atour Hotel as well, a chain that I had a good experience in back in Zhanjiang. I guess it’d be a good potential place to base myself on a future trip — central district, near very walkable areas, and with roads that allow car travel to and from the area without being too logjammed. Probably. That was my first at-a-glance impression anyway.

I was also not far from a really bright building, and I would later discover that this, too, was actually a hotel and not a heritage building of some kind.

Walking north, I saw a pretty little courtyard off to my left. There was a walking path into a neighbourhood area that I didn’t take in this direction, but I did at least grab a couple of pictures.

There was also a Yakult lady there. I was surprised she was looking at the camera here upon reviewing the shots after because I started taking pictures of the building next to her and then swung the camera down for one without purposefully looking at her, but it came out to a nice shot anyway. The reason this is significant is because I had recently read this article about Yakult Ladies (local) in Japan, and their role in society, so to not only see one in Guangzhou, China but to also be able to capture such a nice shot was a nice footnote for the vacation.

I went down another side road to explore for a few minutes here, peering into a meat market:

And a fruit shop with lots of bananas:

And a woman with a sewing machine at the side of the road:

And this locksmith shop, something about the way everything is arranged neatly really appealed to me.

I had a late lunch at a nearby shop called Wei Xian Rice Noodle Rolls, and I basically gave Gemini the set meal menu and told it to pick an item out for me. It went for the “local authentic meal” route and picked this, which translated to something like Spare Ribs Rice with Black Bean Sauce + Stewed Pork Lung Soup with Dried Vegetables:

Despite the shop name (Wei Xian in this case is 味先, or Taste First, but by changing the tones you can also get 危险 or Dangerous), the meal was pretty simple, decent-tasting, and safe. It was pretty much the most expensive thing on the menu but cost me just 27 yuan ($5.35 CAD).

After this, I crossed a road and ended up at one of those liminal strata malls that I like so much. This one was called Beijing Mansion, or 北京大厦.

It wasn’t really very big, and there were a couple shops open on the first and second level:

But most of the shops, especially the ones away from the immediate central area, basically looked like variations of these:

For some reason this one was abandoned and there was no one anywhere in sight, but it had a running TV in front of it:

And you know how old and abandoned the mall is when one wall had a bunch of New Year posters mounted to the wall… from 2015! It’s going to go all the way around and be the Year of the Goat again next year!

But the real treasure here was on the fourth floor, where I saw this:

I grabbed one of the booklets on the left before walking off, and Gemini was very happy with this one once I sent it some pictures, because that was a booklet full of inexpensive classes for old people, giving them options of things to do and learn after retirement to keep them active and give them a community. Even though it’s nothing but a spreadsheet inside, I think it’s one of the top 5 pieces of ephemera that I’ve found on this trip. Here, have a taste of the very fun and enamouring spreadsheet too.

Next, I ended up at a mall called TeeMall, or Tianhe City. It’s not only not the first TeeMall here in the city that I’ve seen, but it wasn’t even the only TeeMall at this intersection, there was the one I visited and then one more across the road with the exact same name but that wasn’t connected as far as I could tell. How weird.

There were a bunch of people sitting on coloured chairs in front of fish tanks outside of this one restaurant.

There was also an outdoor garden on the 4th and 5th level, and I went up there to look around, passing this parabolic sign along the way.

The fourth level had a walkway with restaurants along the side, and a pet cafe, of all things.

And then there was a pretty pink-lined staircase going up to the level 5 terrace, where there were also more restaurants, but higher scale than the ones on the fourth level, as well as offices. There was also a really nice washroom right in the far corner of that top level of the mall, so that felt like finding a little, hidden piece of treasure.

I then went down to the basement and found a bunch of anime-centric shops there, like a Lashinbang, which is one of the main second-hand goods stores in Japan. The one here was tiny though.

I almost bought some random Uma Musume booster card packs for 15 yuan from that last store above but decided better of it, especially since the cashier was nowhere to be found.

It was 6 pm once I got tired of the mall, and I went out to the junction to cross the road. The other TeeMall is visible on the right here. As opposed to the one “behind” me that I just stepped out of.

Due to the anime shops in the basement, there were also a couple of people that I saw dressed up and walking around, and there was a Bocchi from Bocchi the Rock! waiting here at the junction where I was too.

Across the road, I slid past the other mall and walked past the giant ship that was in front of it. I really like the contrast between the “shiny” street and mall on the right, and the more run-down residential buildings to the left, hidden “behind” the shiny exterior. I enjoy that sort of contrast.

They’re almost completely invisible to tourists who just follow the main trails, though.

Somewhere around here, I saw a tempting left road that veered off towards the gods only know where. I decided to follow that one instead of the tourist roads. According to a sign that I saw later on, this was Gaodi Street (高第街), but I don’t really know if the entire thing was named that or just the end of the road where the sign was.

This pedestrian path (and motorcycles, it was infested with motorcycle drivers too) also was warded off from the dirtier residential buildings behind, but a part of it was obviously under demolition or re-construction:

The path itself was long and winding and had nothing but various clothing stores all the way through. There were a few tourists walking through, but it actually seemed to be largely locals, school children, people on carts bringing goods to the shops, and an endless convoy of Meituan motorcycle drivers trying to bring a meal somewhere to make their daily quota. I didn’t buy anything, but I was close to just picking up various things in places because they were so cheap. Nothing jumped out at me as I walked by, but I could probably have found some nice stuff if I had taken the time to rifle through the stores.

And here’s a stray? black cat I saw walking by:

Gaodi Street eventually crossed a road called Guangzhou Qiyi Road and turned into a different sort of street altogether — instead of endless rows of shops selling clothes, instead here they were shoe shops, dozens and dozens of them. By and large, they looked to be fairly upscale as well, at least appearance wise. These were clean, if small and independent, stores with nice-looking shoes.

Well, except for this one storefront:

The street eventually dumped me back onto the main road, and I looked at my map and found that I was three blocks or so west of where Beijing Road actually was. I followed the road north and around and caught sight of this, which seemed to be a real estate agent… listing his properties on paper on the side of a stairwell.

Very weird, but the person was not there AND had left some business cards there so I yoinked one of those anyway and walked on.

I followed the street north and a bit east, and at some point passed a whole row of shops selling trophies and medals. That seemed to me to be a really specific niche to try to have a number of shops in an area all specialize in.

Kel texted me around this time and I said that I would take a car back to meet her in her area for dinner, but not before making a joke that maybe she should come over to where I am to eat at this place with a metric ton of locals waiting outside that I happened to be walking by instead. That’s generally how you know a place is truly good!

And this picture I took because “Visible ear picking” across the road made me smile. I mean, you do what you have to to make a living.

Eventually, I saw a bunch of lanterns at the end of my street and that turned out to be the west side of one of the Beijing Road side paths:

I ordered a Didi here, and while waiting for the car, some local man came up to me holding a spray in his hand. He asked if I wanted to buy it and bent over toward my shoe to spray it… I instantly knew what he was trying to do and leapt out of the way, yelling “不要不要不要!” at that cockroach of a human being and then moving away from him. Damn scammers that prey on tourists. If he had managed to get the spray on my shoe I would probably have kicked either the can or he himself, and then the police officer nearby would have had to intervene.

But thankfully, that timeline did not come to pass. I got into my car and it zoomed on home, and since I managed to get into the building on my own volition this time, Kel pressed the elevator button from her floor so that I could get up to her without actually having the swipe card that would allow me to use the elevator floor buttons. Funnily, I was in the elevator with a Meituan delivery person who also did not have an access card, so we were both in the elevator going up without either of us having actually pressed a floor button. The elevator door opened on the 24th floor or something and he handed his food to someone waiting there, and then he pressed the lobby button (the only one which works without a card) and looked puzzled when the elevator continued to go up. I apologized and said I was doing the same thing as him and getting a ride up to a higher floor, haha.

Anyway, Kel and I chilled in her apartment for a bit, and I checked out the other anime package that had been delivered earlier that day:

All the Taobao packages that we were waiting for have come in now except one, which is arriving sometime on Friday and was still on time as far as I knew.

After a bit of chatting, we went out for dinner, visiting one of the other stores down below that Kel had not been to yet, but that we had discussed going to earlier in the week. This store was called Rice Space, or 大米先生 (Mr. Big Rice), and was a store where they made a bunch of different side dishes and you picked whatever you wanted to eat with your rice. Then you scanned it under a repurposed book scanner and an AI detected what was in your dish and charged you for it. It was interesting to see in action.

The detected soup was actually the wrong soup (the one we had was radish soup) but I suppose they were the same price anyway. We watched the restaurant buzz around us as we ate, since the chefs and workers started cleaning up to get ready for closing time not too long after we started eating. Those vegetables on the right, the bowl to the right of the fish and above the mostly-offscreen tomato and eggs, were amazing! I bought two bowls of white rice and five side dishes and it came to 51 CNY, or $10.11 CAD, so it was quite inexpensive as well, and would be even more so if you had tried all their dishes and knew what your favourites were and just came here to select them.

Then we went back to Kel‘s apartment and talked for hours before she retired for the night. Fireworks graced us with their presence at some point too, but they were low fireworks and so were really hard to photograph.

I did my laundry and hung everything up to dry, sorted my loot for the day and took some photographs, and then retired to bed early, relatively speaking, at about 1 am!