One more week to go! My SIM card provider, Simba, had an app outage today, and then when it got restored, the app layout was changed and no longer showed me how much roaming data I have left to use while abroad in China/Japan. Just great, guys. Very clever. Pro company move.

I had been tracking my usage daily so I know that I should not be in any danger of burning through the rest of my bandwidth before Mar 23 when my trip ends and the one month validity period for my Simba card ends, even if I tried my best to use it all, but still.

And as mentioned yesterday, this is my last full Monday abroad! I'm ready to go home now I think. My bed and my normal-sized keyboard and my lazy nonbiri days at home gaming call for me.

I woke up with a terrible neckache left over from the previous day still, which prevented me from turning my head rightwards or putting too much weight on my right side. However, this got better with rest over the course of the morning, and didn't really bother me much anymore by the time I left the hotel in the afternoon. And by the time evening rolled around it was pretty much an afterthought.

I also wanted to note down how clean Shanghai seems to be in general. Compared to the previous cities that I've been in, I haven't seen a single housefly or unknown-fly or ant or anything like that around anywhere that I've visited thus far. Maybe it's just the climate this time of year since the temperatures here are still rather low, hovering around the low teens in Celsius most days, but still. There was not a single fly around Yuyuan Bazaar yesterday, for example, even though multiple places had food lying out in the open for display purposes.

Talking about food, it looks like the exact dishes in my hotel's morning buffet breakfast rotates a little daily too. Today I noticed a few changes in the noodles and the side dishes available:

Also I didn't really look in the dimsum bowls yesterday, and I regret doing so today. So cute! So doomed too.

Like yesterday, I took two dishes of food, and then a cup of juice:

While lazing around in my room (and working on my blog and some other actual work), I requested some complimentary water from the front desk and the butler robot came along with some:

I had to enter my room number in the panel on top and then his chest opened and he offered me his lifeblood:

The water was hot, so I left them on the counter in my room to cool off and thanked the butler bot as he turned to go.

Much, much later, when I was finally ready to go out, I went to the train station again and this time confirmed which ticket machine I needed to use in order to get the fancy tickets instead of the recyclable plastic cards which I don't (normally) get to keep. It's these red machines that I wanted!

I vaguely did remember seeing things like day passes that I could get too though, and I think those are from the other machine type, though I'm not totally clear on this. Maybe I should try to get one of those too... but I do like the station specific tickets too.

My first stop for today was a mall complex thing called Daning Life Hub, located near Yanchang Road Station.

Basically, I remembered Riyue Plaza in Haikou, and Xiongfeng City in Guangzhou, and was trying to look for another mall complex made out of multiple different mall buildings. After consulting with Gemini, who identified a couple of them, I picked this one as it was on the same train line as my hotel, about a 20-25 minute or so ride away. It had (at least) 12 separate buildings, and the store directory was listed on some poles that could be found through the complex:

Strangely though, even though all the buildings were listed with all their shops, I noticed that several of the buildings themselves were physically absent from the map layout. I never really figured out why. Also, all the buildings were extremely poorly labelled, and often I had to hem and haw a bit to figure out which building I was looking at, often by looking up a store I was staring at in the directory itself.

Anyway, I hadn't had lunch yet, and it was lightly drizzling, so I sought out block 12, which was apparently connected to a Sheraton Hotel, and went up the escalator to take a look at the food area. Level 4 had a food hall which kind of had a canteen-style layout:

And even had an outdoor rooftop patio:

Level 5 also was a dining area, but was catered to restaurants rather than to eateries:

And also sleeping Meituan delivery people who were waiting to be assigned orders from here:

I particularly liked the guy above who was sleeping by the Chinese Chess and Go boards. Like he was waiting for a challenger that never arrived. Anyway, I ended up dining at Daning, specifically at this store:

It was called Dongbei Zhao, and Gemini gave me a lesson on Northern Chinese cuisine as I settled down for a huge, filling bowl of chicken and mushroom stew with exotic mushrooms and a cooking style that was to kill for. This tasted great, and even though there was vermicelli in the stew itself, they also provided me with free rice. And a couple of small snack plates while they were making the meal. And some small mandarin oranges after the meal. I felt like I underpaid them a bit after all that, even though it was a cool 69 yuan ($13.76 CAD) for the meal!

This was so filling that I never really went for dinner later on in the evening! Am I jumping ahead again? In my defence it was 5:10 pm by the time I was done the meal.

After this late lunch, I went up to the 6th floor and... I mean, there were these signs:

Something about a food market on level 6, open late? Sign me up! But level 6 was tiny, and only contained a karaoke lounge and that above roped off sign area and that was it. Gemini pointed out a couple of the signs contradicted each other, and theorized that this was just here as a relic of a failed food market in the past, and was now just an Instagram (well, China's equivalent, Xiaohongshu) location.

Rage. Pure, unbridled rage. I'm ten years too late at this failed shopping mall.

Building 12 was connected to Building 2 via walkways, and I crossed over to Building 2 via that, though my first attempt landed me at a deserted go-kart arena at the top level of a carpark, which was really weird to find.

Going down a few levels put me in a small mall area with some nice open spaces:

It was just really two levels tall though and was I think one of the only two actual indoors mall building in the area outside of some small corridors connecting a couple of shops here and there in the other buildings. Most of the other shops faced outwards into the plazas rather than inwards into a warm corridor.

There was also a Linlee in this one and I was about to buy a drink here when I noticed that they just seemed to have normal yellow ducks that I already had. So I ended up not buying a drink from here. Am I really this materialistic? Gemini hallucinated a couple of other drink stores with alleged collaborations and gifts multiple times here and I had to call it out three separate times to stop telling me nonsense. It made me a bit mad and definitely helped reinforce how Gemini still makes horrific mistakes sometimes in the name of being a sycophant, even though it has Google Maps access, which is one of its biggest drawbacks. This was on the Thinking mode of the AI bot, which is the middle complexity mode that I have access to (Fast < Thinking < Pro).

I did read recently that Google was trying to integrate Gemini into Google Maps to make it so you can ask complex map/location-related natural language questions and get answers from it, and that's one of the ways I've been trying to use Gemini on this trip already, like in this case where I got it to suggest a mall complex like the other two. But the persistent halluciations make me think that it's not quite ready for that level of sophistication currently. Like it was asking me to search for a specific address that it insisted existed somewhere in building 8, while I was out in the rain.

Anyway, while I was out in the drizzle, there was a nice central courtyard that looked like it was set up for an event, but let's just say that due to the rain, there was no one there, and certainly not because the entire shopping complex was struggling and probably mostly dead most of the time.

I mean, even in the indoor pictures above, how many people were there walking around in them? Not many! There were some people around for sure, and I wouldn't call the entire mall complex deserted in a liminal sense, but it definitely was struggling and not a hip place that people went to. The rainy weather didn't help, but nothing's going to save streets like this:

I did really like this restaurant I found though, even though it was pricey:

The seats for this restaurant stretched all the way around the escalator that brought guests up to the restaurant front entrance, which I thought was unique. It was also completely deserted when I was there. Maybe pre-dinner rush? Uhhuh.

There was also no supermarket in this complex, which I guess was because there wasn't actually a housing block in here to serve. Instead, there were two hotels here:

And a few of what I think looked like office buildings on the upper floors of some of the badly-labelled buildings, but that was about it.

I soon tired of this mall and went back to the train station, then caught a train one more stop north, to the weirdly and wonderfully named station, Shanghai Circus World. That apparently was the name of this arena that was next to the station:

But I was headed to a mall next to that arena that Gemini had suggested because it was visually interesting -- Jiuguang Center. The entrance I used to get into the mall looked like this:

Fancy. And the inside of the mall looked like a wobbly donut:

There was a middle sunken plaza area which was mostly unoccupied due to the rain. Too bad, as there was a fancy amusement park below:

The actual front entrance to the plaza was probably this way -- there were a couple of open kiosks in this direction that I was worried for too, but they looked like they were largely sheltered from the drizzle for now.

Despite the shape, there was an inside component of the mall that went all the way around though. It was a very, very upscale mall, and a good chunk of it belonged to a department store, assumedly that of whatever REIT company owned the actual mall.

These children had to sacrifice their heads to afford the rent in the mall:

Levels 4-6 were full of restaurants, and they looked very pretty but were very expensive. At least there was a nice jazz music accompaniment though.

Some interesting things i saw included this outdoor skateboard park that was closed for the rain:

A model car racing track:

And an Alienware store. A physical store!

There was also a fancy, but kind of sparse, supermarket down in the basement too:

With lots of expensive items mixed in with the usual groceries:

I ended up buying more fancy and weird teas here:

That one on the left is the fabled "duck shit tea" but supposedly tastes quite nice despite the name. I'll save it for when I get home though. I probably need some honey for the one in the middle too, as it's sour smoked plum, which Gemini described as a historical cooling drink that they used to drink in the Qing dynasty imperial courts.

Oh, and another milk bottle that I liked the pattern of. White Rabbit again!

Outside the supermarket was what I could only describe as a supermarket-lite, or a department store for supermarkets, there were lots of booths with weird gourmet food items and little toy trinkets. Also very expensive, but interesting to browse.

These mooncakes were not only weirdly-flavoured, they're out of season! By about 6 months!

And I'm not sure I've seen vacuum pressed fish sold like this:

I took the train back home after this, and here's my ticket collection for the night now that I know what machine to buy them from:

I wasn't sure why there was a colour difference, but Gemini thinks it's because Xujiahui is a major hub station whereas the other two were just random standalone stations along the line. Who knows for sure!

There were a couple other notes of interest that I found before I retired for the night and wanted to log here. One was this nice shot of someone standing in the rain and talking on his phone, on the walkways outside Metro City:

The other was that I finally checked out the 10 pm to 11 pm free snack time in the hotel restaurant, and it turned out that it was a bowl of wontons (that they also served as an option during breakfast but that I had never taken). I had to ask the guys in the kitchen for a bowl.

It was okay. It wasn't terrible. It was... food. I added pepper and those green onions and enjoyed it well enough but it probably isn't something I'd look forward to like the buffet breakfast, or ever come down for again unless I was feeling particularly peckish. I did skip dinner tonight though so this did help make up for that!