The right side of my neck is killing me, but without much to write about on the previous day, I was done my blog entry and prep work for today before 11 am today, so I decided to go out early for once and see the glamour that was Shanghai. Gemini described this as "last week of vacation" FOMO and it's probably right, but I don't need that sort of snot from my AI chatbot so I made it go crunch some pi digit calculations a day late in penance. Well, I didn't do that, but maybe I should have. It is true though that I am rapidly approaching the end of my trip and tomorrow will be my "last full Monday" and so on. I am looking forward to going home at this point though.

While in my hotel room, I've also been watching Gamefy, which is apparently a specific Shanghai channel that I get on my hotel TV (channel 62, and also known as 游戏风云). It just does game reruns all day long it seems, alternating between League of Legends games from 2022-2023 and the first 30 minutes of random Steam games being played and commentated on by two rotating hosts from a group of four or five. And the game are largely games that I've never heard of before. It's kind of interesting and reminds me of an old eSports channel I saw in South Korea when I was there with Steffy back around 2015 or so.

With the TV mounted at the foot of my bed, it's been very comfortable to just kick back and watch between spurts of panicking about my blog though, so that's been nice. The morning breakfast buffet has also been really nice. I haven't had that since the first Japan leg of my trip basically. Who needs to go out? I'm enjoying my stay just in the hotel itself. Mmm.

The breakfast buffet is technically a paid event, but since one can just walk in to it, I'm not sure how they really tell who qualifies for it and who doesn't. Maybe camera recognition of some kind for all I know. Or maybe just an honour system thing. Anyway there were both Western and Chinese breakfast options, and this is what the buffet looked like this morning.

Western stuff:

Chinese stuff:

Condiments:

Drinks:

Fruits:

There were also two hugs pots of porridge to one side that I didn't grab, neither with my camera nor with my bowl. What I did grab were two plates of food:

And a cup of apple juice.

After going back to my room and packing my provisions for the day, I ventured out to test the train network in Shanghai. The nearest train station was about a 10 minute walk from my place up through the walkways connecting the shopping malls that I had scouted out yesterday, although this was because I hadn't realized that there was a nearer entrance until I found it later on in the evening on the way home.

The train system was very easy to use and very cheap to boot though. As opposed to a Didi, which would have cost me upwards of 20 yuan, a ride from my nearest station, Xujiahui, to my target station, Yuyuan Garden, cost just 4 yuan, or $0.80 CAD. The ticket machine also didn't require a passport or ID card to use (looking at you, Haikou), and I could just select the station I wanted to travel to by tapping the target station on a picture of the subway ap. Even Tokyo isn't this convenient. It also gave me exact instructions, in English, on how to get there:

And it gave me a nice, pink ticket to keep as ephemera! I wasn't actually sure whether I was going to be able to keep the ticket, so I bought a second ticket since it was so cheap anyway. It turned out that all I had to do with these tickets was scan their QR code anyway so one ticket would have been enough, but spending an additional 80 cents to be safe was no big deal. Stay tuned for the return trip later for the second part of this drama though.

But for now, I found myself by Fuyou Road, near Yuyuan Garden. My first major distraction and unplanned stop of the day was this building:

The Fuyuan Commercial Building, or 福源商厦, was a four storey building that I spent some time walking around in, and I also have to give a shout out here to Gemini and its ability to answer a question that I ask all the time based on a picture that I give it -- "Where am I?" The contextual answers it gives, especially now that I'm no longer in backwater China, is really helpful.

I really liked the ground floor level of this building, it was full of little stores and yet not overly packed, and although it had some stuff that looked to be tourist oriented, it also wasn't a major tourist stopping point in and of itself so it had more esoteric shops mixed in too, like the brush shop in the screenshot below. And although the middle areas were all active and busy, some of the side and back aisles were either closed and abandoned or used for storage instead of being actual shopfronts.

In contrast, the second level of the building was entirely devoted to Chinese medicinal herbs, dried fruits, and so on. Just about every store up here was dedicated to it, and there were over two dozen stores up here!

The number of open stores on the third level dropped off dramatically, and those that were open were mostly antiques and jewellery stores. The shop on the right in the second picture below has an ornamental crane prominently perched inside! I wonder if that'll fit in my suitcase? And within my 30 kg limit?

Lastly, the fourth level was strange because 2/3 of it was owned by a large jewellery department store that felt very out of place in this mall. It must have bought over most of the tenants here and combined all their shops. There was at least one shop open in the 1/3 of the level that wasn't owned by them though. I wonder what the story is with that. And there was a rest area secreted up here too.

That jewellery shop was a sign of things to come. Across from this Fuyuan Commercial Building was a two-level building with open-air escalators leading up to the top level from the road. This mini-mall was packed with jewellery shops as well.

I know jewellery can be spelled with 7 letters instead of 9, but this is ridiculous.

And I enjoyed the day to day life on display here, of these children playing or studying outside the shop that their mom was running.

A little further on, Fuyou Road intersected with another road that I believe was Lishui Road, and this area was just a large pedestrian street that vehicle were prohibited from entering. There were nice old-style buildings here on all four corners of the junction, but all they hid within were jewellery stores, tons of them!

How boring. Literally, this is store directory of one of the buildings. Nothing but jewellery.

Down one of the streets from there was a small eatery area, and perhaps I shouldn't have eaten here since this was right on the touristy road, but what the heck, it looked interesting enough.

It was a roadside food court, and the first one that I'd seen that looked like that, although I found another one much later in the evening by Nanjing Road East, which was also another severely overtouristed road. The mirrors in the eating area also made it look a lot larger than it actually was, but it still wasn't too difficult to find a seat alone. I ended up buying something not very exciting at all though, just regular beef fried noodles, which cost 35 yuan or $6.98 CAD, probably about 10-15 yuan more than it should have cost.

But it wasn't bad at all at least. I then bought some fried durian and sesame balls to snack on for something different. I don't seem to have taken a picture of the snack itself, but I at least took a picture of the stall:

28 yuan netted me 3 of each type of fried ball, and the sesame ones were just okay but the durian ones were quite nice.

I next found myself at a nearby landmark called the Jiuqu Bridge, where tons of people were talking photos, but I didn't cross it yet and instead cut across the square next to the bridge.

There were lots of tour groups and lots of people offering to dress passersby up in traditional clothing and taking photographs of them. This next photo captures both of these in one well-placed shot, as well as some of the very modern shops at the base of these traditional-styled buildings:

This next shot shows some giant flowers placed as though they were blooming from the inaccessible second storey, as well as a girl who had been all dolled up and was posing for said photo from one of those services.

Apparently our family owns a shop right here at the square too.

After some meandering about and in and out some of the malls, I returned to the square again and fthis time crossed the bridge:

This was an annoying journey across with way too many tourists here. And despite signs saying not to throw anything into the water, people were feeding the koi fish below pieces of bread and stuff as well. There were some pieces of discarded garbage in there like paper cups as well. On the other side of the bridge was the actual Yuyuan, or Yu Garden, which makes the name Yuyuan Garden that the Shanghai ticket machine call the station earlier seem a bit repetitive in hindsight since the "yuan" here already means garden. But anyway Yuyuan required payment to enter and I wasn't in the mood to pay money to look at flowers and trees, so I passed on this.

I also found this little food court area secreted away in a building. Despite its prime area, it wasn't nearly as packed as the food court I ate at earlier, and I did wish that I had saved some appetite to eat here instead as the ambience was so much better. Alas, I didn't, and I only snapped a couple of pictures before moving on.

Another little mall I went into here, in this region that I believe was collectively called the Yuyuan Bazaar, or Yuyuan Old Street, even though there was nothing old about any of the structures here besides vaguely their look, gave me this nice snapshot from above.

I also found a White Rabbit shop here and finally splurged on something for myself that wasn't tea or snacks, a plushie/toy, or a picture of Tigey: I purchased a metal water bottle to replace a milk bottle shaped one that I had gotten from somewhere and had used lots back at Edmonton in the past, but that had broken down and fallen out of favour a couple of years ago. Kel warning me not to use plastic water bottles a few days ago might have had something to do with this too. Anyway I now have a White Rabbit metal water bottle! It cost 158 yuan, or $31.52 CAD. I'll make up the cost by taking the train around Shanghai instead of using Didi.

I finally left the Yuyuan area after this and went on further north and east. I ended up at the Fuyou Shang Commercial Building, which this guy was sitting in front of, unabashedly people-watching.

The directory of the place looked like this:

And the shops here were a lot more narrow and clustered together, giving the entire place a cramped but cozy feel:

In the basement was an area where books and papers were being sold:

A lot of it was nonsense and propaganda, but there were some interesting things like handwritten letters of some kind:

And there was an area off to the side where there was just a bunch of papers and books and photo albums dumped onto the floor, I never quite figured out why. Some people occasionally sat down on stools to look at some of the stuff there, while other people stepped on the papers near the edges without a second glance.

I then went further up the building and was surprised to find that this shopping mall was actually quite well-populated, even on the upper floors. There were shops selling a wide variety of paraphernalia, stationery, toys, red house decorations, and so on.

One specific shop was selling robots and Tomica cars, tons of them:

And on the uppermost levels were clothing stores, especially a couple anchor ones on either end of the top level that looked to be mostly wholesale but still seemed to be set up for walk-in buyers, even though there was very little foot traffic up there.

Outside the building, between it and the neighbouring one that was called the New Treasure House (新藏宝楼), there was a family-run stall selling sugar cane and fresh fruit juice, and also a sign advertising art services. This, of course, meant Tigey was going to add another commissioned portrait to his collection.

Not bad at all! This cost 30 yuan for the colour version, and the woman standing behind the artist was his mom that did the actual hawking, and who then had to go call the artist out from inside the building once I said I was interested in having Tigey drawn. I also bought a drink while waiting, so the entire family got 45 yuan in total off of me in the end. Worth it though.

That New Treasure House building, or Xin Cangbao Lou, had a directory that looked like this:

It wasn't all that exciting though. The bottom levels looked like this:

And sold a mix of clutter and clothing and stuff. The second and third levels sold jade and antiques, and both these levels were colour themed, with the second level having red brick storefronts and the third one having blue brick ones:

The fourth level was similar to the basement level in the previous mall, in that it was just a wide open space with tables, in this case containing more antiques:

Nothing past the first to second level escalator was working too, which is usually the sign of a dying mall, but in particular the fourth to fifth level one stretched up into darkness and looked like no one had been up there for ages. There were little pieces of junk on both the escalator steps too showing that it hadn't been turned on in decades. Nonetheless, nothing was actually blocking me from going up, so I went up to find this:

Hoo boy. That was an interesting find! I didn't see the way up to the 6th level and wasn't going to risk that anyway, so I went back down and out, satisfied with those pictures of the fifth floor.

I was about done with strata malls after this and was getting physically tired, especially since my neck was still giving me problems, so I made my way down and out, past the artist and the parents again, and then eastwards and out of the Fuyou Road/Yuyuan area toward the actual Bund. I headed towards a mall called the BFC, or Bund Finance Center. This path led across a park, past a girl who was fishing on a bridge (and had a couple of small critters in her collection jar), and then a couple of roads:

And then I discovered that the BFC was not just one mall, but an entire complex of office buildings with three mall buildings:

Right. Heading toward the south cluster where two of the malls were, I ran across a weekend fair that was happening as well. This was unfortunately called The Bund International Bread Festival:

Great, just great! Me, the world traveller who hates bread, happens to stumble upon a bread festival while cold and hungry. I did at least pick up a nice event brochure out of it, and I did eventually pick up dinner here too in the form of something that translated into a Mozzarella Cheese Hot Dog Baguette:

It was fine.

I went into the southern malls after that to warm up and use the washroom, and walked them from top to bottom. Some of the more interesting finds in here included this Pop Mart store in a round booth in the middle of the ground floor:

This store name that I really liked, in contrast to a lot of silly Chinese store names that cannot be pronounced in any language and that I don't like:

This big ball pit, of which I believe one needed to spend a certain amount of money in the mall and produce a receipt to enter. I think.

This Pokemon pop up store, a franchise which I don't like at all but I do realize I have a minority opinion on. A curse on Nintendo though.

And this eye-catching upright car with CRT televisions set into its base, advertising a clothing shop that was just behind me from where I took the picture:

There was also a Linlee store in the north mall, and going there and getting a drink re-energized me and gave me the hype to finish up the rest of my evening later on. Up until that point I was contemplating just going home even though the early evening had just arrived. These drinks cost 3 yuan more than the Guangzhou ones though, like 21-23 yuan for most of them, and I don't know if this is a Shanghai thing (I believe Hong Kong Linlees also cost more) or a tourist tax thing. Must research by finding more stores.

Look at that giant duck on top of the display cabinet with their ducks on offer! Also I got to choose my own little duck to take home, and I took a pink one.

I love how the sad horse looks so judgemental instead. I can hear it say in Jah's voice: "Whaaat! Another one?! Hmph!"

Lastly, and this was an original goal of the day, I reached the Bund after nightfall had arrived and got to see the glorious city skyline there. I took dozens of photos here, but I'm obviously not going to show them all since they are very samey and can honestly be Googled for the same effect anyway. But here are some from the southern part of the west bank of the Huangpu river, looking east towards Lujiazui in Pudong.

I like the way the glow here made this tall building look like a lighthouse:

And here's a shot of the bayfront that I was walking along. I ended up walking all the way to kwhere that building with the green top in the middle-right was.

There were lots of people doing photo shots for their own profile with friends, so there was prime opportunity for me to capture pictures of people taking pictures, which I love:

And I got a good number of pictures of just the crowd in general:

Here's a skyline one from nearer the middle, featuring a motorboat going by:

There were plenty of cruises going back and forth along the river, some of them playing the famous Shanghai Bund song, and they cost something like 120 yen a seat. There were supposely ferry crossings for a couple of yen that just took you to the other bank too, but I didn't see those and didn't look too hard as that wasn't my plan for the evening. There were also plenty of people offering to take photographs for other people with their actual non-phone cameras in return for a nominal fee, but I skirted around all of those people too.

I took as many pictures of people as I did of the landscape as I meandered my way south, guided by the Baidu map showing me where the nearest train station on this side of the river was (i.e. I used the 附近地铁站 search and ignored the one that was across the river and also the one that I had arrived at and took the third closest train station, Nanjing Road East, as my walking destination). Both people and the skyline found themselves sucked into my camera as I went along:

I don't know who this girl is, but I consider this my best shot of the day just by chance of how my phone camera decided to auto-focus the picture, and how the people around her are blurred:

And here's a picture of the skyline at the northern end of my riverside walk for the evening:

I was at an incredibly busy intersection here, where Nanjing Road East met East Zhongshan Road No. 1:

And my train station was at the other end of that, yucks. Here's a picture of the same intersection but from the other side, once I had crossed it:

And a photo of some of the crowd as I made my way west along that road:

It was a very, very touristy area and not one I enjoyed at all, and my energy was flagging again so I just ignored a couple of free "museums" that were just pretexts of selling overpriced junk, two White Rabbit stores, a couple of hotels, a big Chiikawa store (I'll never understand how that franchise got popular, the anime isn't particularly good), some sort of popup market with overpriced candy and food, and more. While it was packed with people, at least it was not shoulder to shoulder busy like I thought it was when looking at it from the riverside, so that was a small relief.

I made my way to the train station, Nanjing Road East, and armed with foreknowledge of the ticketing system, this time I just bought one ticket again, but was surprised when instead of giving me a paper ticket with a QR code, it gave me a single-use plastic card with no station identifier and a note that it had to be recycled at my destination station. Hmmm. It again cost only 4 yuan, so again I found myself buying a second one just in case, and using the first one to pass the gates and return to my home station, Xujiahui Station.

Indeed, at the destination station, I tried to just scan the card to get through and the station gate refused to let me through, saying that I had to insert the card instead. But there was a station attendant nearby, and when I asked him if it was possible to keep the card as a 纪念品 souvenir, he thought a bit and then just opened the exit gate for me without ever really checking if I even had the correct fare for the station (I did). Nice guy there, thank you!

So due to that, I ended up with two copies of both the paper ticket for my outgoing trip, and the plastic card for my return trip of the day:

Some cool ephemera, just for me! When reviewing this with Gemini later, it stated that the plastic card machine was the older one and was being phased out for the new papers with the QR codes, but that not all stations had those machines installed yet. It also mumbled something about China possibly eventually going to an all digital system, but that didn't seem to be in line with them installing these new machines and I hope that doesn't happen since not everyone has or wants to use a phone, and how would you get home if the phone died while you were out, or it dropped into the Huangpu River?

It had also started drizzling when I left the train station, but the walk wasn't too long since I had now found the closer exit to my hotel, so I scurried back and hid myself in my room. I was feeling cold after being out for so long in the Shanghai evening and so I turned up my thermostat and had a nice, hot shower, then promptly fell asleep afterwards as I was really tired after my long day out, only waking up after three hours or so. There was a 10 pm - 11 pm free snack thing in the kitchen downstairs that I had wanted to check out, but I slept right past that window, so I sorted my loot and did my blog prep work before going back to bed again and waking up the next day for another round of buffet breakfast instead!