My last full day in Guangzhou started with me booking the Shanghai hotel that I’d be staying in tomorrow. Assuming I don’t do a day trip somewhere when I reach the Japan leg of my trip, this makes it so I only have one more thing left to book for my trip, which is my hotel in Tokyo. This hotel apparently comes with a free daily morning buffet too, which should be really interesting. Well, it’s not free per se, but the cost is included in my ticket deal from trip.com.

Kel left for work early as per usual but had said that she would come to wherever I was for dinner as long as I wasn’t much too far to the north or something like that. With that in mind, I went back to the central Tianhe district, leaving a bit earlier than usual at just after 1:30 pm. I took a Didi down to the east gate of the Guangdong Museum, where I found out that the only gate that they actually let solo visitors in from was the western gate, so I had to circle the building to find that main gate.

Admission was free, but required registration on their app, which I did right then and there. It also required them to manually approve my actual identity with an attached photo of the passport that I was going to use for entry, but that process took less than a minute as well. So, without too much friction for once, I created my account, claimed a free ticket, and entered.

The funny thing is that I actually had no intention of actually going to see the exhibits here. Maybe if I had more time, but I didn’t want to spend my final day here in Guangzhou at a local museum, even one that showcased the thousand year history of the city or something like that. Instead, I came to the east gate because it was a convenient drop-off location for the district in general, and then signed up and entered the museum just to use the washroom and to check out the gift shop. I did almost end up buying a plushie from the shop, but it was too expensive and I wasn’t feeling it, so in the end I kept my money instead and walked out of the museum, passing a whole crowd of people in the lobby who were not there when I entered.

Outside the museum was a plaza area that connected it with the nearby Guangzhou Opera House, and where I could get a good view of the Canton Tower to the south and a few tall office buildings to the north. I duly collected pictures of all that, starting with the courtyard:

Then south:

Then north:

Then west:

But what I was actually here for was something called the Mall of the World, a supposedly vast, sprawling underground mall that spanned several city blocks and that stretched as far south as the museum/opera house area that I was at, all the way to the the north side of Huangpu Boulevard to the north, near where I had walked around with Kel the other evening just before we visited Grandview Mall. And the escalators down were easy to find in the area, as there were several of them. It immediately dumped me into a bus terminal which then led into a large but largely empty corridor though, starting me off right away on a liminal foot.

There was a random suited guy in a random side room that I walked by at a table that looked really, really out of place. He asked what I wanted when I snapped a picture of him and I told him I was looking for somewhere to eat, and he helpfully pointed me down the correct path. But seriously, what is this and what was he doing here.

The place he pointed me to was an underground-only food complex called City Park that was divided into four sections labelled A, B, C, and D for some reason. Here’s the map and shop list for posterity’s sake, even though there was an item blocking the bottom half of the shop list so it had to be taken in two snapshots.

But it was nice to be out of the tunnels and back into something approaching a mall again:

And in that circular stairwell in the blue B area, i saw a whole bunch of Meituan food delivery drivers chilling out and waiting for orders, I guess gaming the system to a certain extent as this was a place with a large concentration of eateries.

Not all of them were open though, and as I’ve come to expect from the China malls that I’ve been to, sometimes things are just closed off and perpetually coming soon.

After feeding the list of shops to Gemini and asking it for options, my first choice restaurant, store B03, was actually closed, so I instead ended up at B05 next to it instead, a store called San Liang Fen. Its paper menu had a rice set which enticed me in, but the actual online menu once I scanned the barcode on the table did not have any rice bowls at all, so feeling a bit cheated I ended up ordering a bowl of stir-fried chili pork with rice noodles instead:

This was 28 yen plus a 3-yen egg addon. This was not hot in the least, not even after I added a bunch of condiments myself, but oh well. It still tasted fine.

It wasn’t particularly filling though, and as I continued wandering the halls after lunch, I ended up in a small side passage leading to a plaza away from the restaurants, and instead had a small row of eateries:

Just past that was a convenience store, and I ended up getting this rather epicly named Thousand-Layer Ham Sandwich to munch on.

There weren’t quite a thousand layers in there, but it was close. Jah also appreciated the picture of it in Discord afterwards, as a lifelong connoisseur of ham sandwiches.

I then continued on wandering afterwards. Roughly speaking, the Mall of the World is an interconnected subterranean “mall” divided up into a southern, central, and northern area, with that southern area being the City Park area that I was in. Each of the three areas had its own thing going, so the south area was full of middle-class restaurants, for example, whereas the northern one was more desolate and largely had independent eateries, half of which were closed down. The central area was the most boring one of the three though, even though most of the retail stores in the Mall of the World area were there — large parts of it were just dedicated to things like gyms or theatres or clubs that were not open or that could not possibly cater to 99% of the people walking by.

Instead, the true draw of the Mall of the World a\s not really those northern/central/southern plazas themselves, but the connections leading off from them to the buildings on the east and west side of each plaza, as those all led into the basements of those other buildings which themselves were also malls for the most part, and those ones were more well-curated and maintained in general. There were over a dozen of them all connected up to the plaza, and there was no way I was going to walk through all of them or even really know which ones I was in at any given time when looking back at photos.

There were also vast corridors meant to hold lots of people connecting the plazas and the malls, and some of them had advertisements plastered on them, like this one for Arknights: Enfield (local), which I was playing just before I ventured off on my trip.

There was supposedly an automated train system called an APM somewhere down here too but I never organically ran into it and didn’t go out of my way to look for it. Instead I walked the passages and looked at the interesting plazas that I ended up in. In this case, this was the entrance into the central plaza:

Each of the three main plazas also had a connection to an outdoor sunken plaza area that integrated with the park above, which in this case can be seen outside the doors in that above picture. They look basically like this:

And this:

And they often had escalators that went down further as well, probably to the aforementioned APM that I never checked out.

Instead, the passage I followed from the central plaza took me past these guys:

Into an interesting blue-coloured passage:

Which then dumped me out into a parking garage road or something for some reason:

And then into a dead-end mall area that was almost completely abandoned:

I actualy could find no way on from the end of that corridor, so I actually had to go up from there into the park area, which netted me this shot of a nice cafe:

And then down another escalator into a mall that was equally dead:

This one actually had signs that said to follow the freight corridor to get into the actual mall:

Which eventually worked:

I also found a Zenless Zone Zero ad on the wall around here, which I snapped:

The Bangboo plushie which I got a few days ago from Grandview Mall hails from this game. Anyway, I believe I was in the northern plaza at this time, but this place had a lot of shops that were just not there.

I did like the general vibe of the place though, and am always happy to see the presence of independent (I think) eateries rather than chain restaurants.

That northern plaza eventually ended in a tunnel that went under Huangpu Boulevard on the north side of the Mall of the World, and that was manned by hawkers trying to get people to buy one last thing before leaving the subterranean caverns. It then linked up with the walking streets above ground.

Following that street led me to the south of the trendy Tianhe South street area where Kel and I walked the other night. I didn’t want to go any further in that direction since I had already been there before.

So instead I went back to the last road, which I beleive was Tiyu West Street, and followed it west.

There was a weird turn that went south into a residential neighbourhood here, and on a whim I took this turn. It looked somewhat normal and nice and neat at first, even though there was not nearly enough parking for everyone, and there were even a bunch of neighbourhood shops in here that might never see much clientele outside of the people living right here in this area:

But as I went further south, the age of the buildings there started to show.

Look at all these cats!

Oddly enough, I was looking for a southern exit from here so that I could reconnect with the passage leading under Huangpu Boulevard and head back to the Mall of the World from there, since Kel had contacted me by then and was preparing to head down to meet me, but I could not find an exit from the southern side of the block, it was all barricaded and locked up and the one restaurant worker who was standing by an open gate that led through his restaurant shook his head at me when I asked if I could cut through there to get back to the main road. Another couple was walking around bewildered around the same time as me too, and all three of us, who had entered through the northwest side of this residential block, eventually had to cut back around to the northeast side of the block to find an exit before leaving the maze. I then cut south and east from there and found this convenience store along the road:

And these bottles of milk inside that store:

Huzzah! That was the lychee (leechee) milk with the cute picture on the label that Kel wanted to try, and I managed to find another place selling it on the very last day. I bought two bottles and we drank it later that evening back at her place.

I cut back through the park and walked all the way back to the southern plaza of the Mall of the World, where I saw this sight at its outdoor sunken plaza area:

No, not the tower in the sunset, though that was nice too, but I meant the Meituan food delivery drivers all sitting in a row, waiting for orders to come in on their app.

I went back down into the mall area and then to the entrance D of the underground train station at Zhujiang New Town to wait for Kel, and once we met up and came back above ground, the sun had set and everything was lit up in neon colours.

Very pretty. We walked around the northern plaza for a bit, and Kel pointed out the absurd English spelling on this sign:

She also bought herself and me one last round of Linlee ice tea drinks and rubber ducks, though we both just got a new-style normal yellow duck with a fat neck. I hadn’t had one of those yet though so it was new to me. She also bought me a special wind-up Linlee toy because that store happened to have some in stock. This thing is weird! Winding up the toy and then letting go causes the duck to ski forwards along the surface it’s standing on.

We then had dinner at a Korean place named Spoon, with me having tuna kimchi stew and her having tuna bibimbap. I thought that the tuna took away from the flavour of the kimchi stew, and she didn’t like the purple rice that they gave her, but otherwise it was fine. We also really liked the kimchi pancakes that we ordered.

We took the train back home afterwards to save on cost, then spent some time chatting for one last evening while I packed up my suitcase, before she retired for the night and I went to work on my blog. I still did end up sleeping for three hours or so on her couch in the end, and we were both up by 7:30 am in preparation for me finally leaving the safety and comfort of her house for Shanghai the following morning! Goodbye, Clifford Wonderland, it was kind of awkward but nice meeting you! Thanks for the homestay again, Kel!