The wind wasn’t taking me anywhere today — the cough I had yesterday persisted on and off and cost me some sleep and a bit of a headache, and then my nose got stuffy. And although I had a very pleasant video chat with Zian this morning, I thought my voice sounded weird, and I was constantly trying to stifle my sniffles. I went out to brunch, then sneezed messily all over my hand when I was at a 7-Eleven store and had to napkin myself down (thankfully no one was watching that I saw), and after that episode I decided to buy some tea and go back to my hotel room and vegetate there a bit to rest up.

There’s a few reasons for this — I don’t know if I’m actually sick as it’s a slight cough and a runny nose without phlegm, but I did lose my sense of taste mid-day, so maybe I was. I just largely sneezed a lot and wiped away a runny nose. But I wanted to be as un-sick as possible when I visit my sister over the next couple of days. She’s busy enough without getting sick thanks to me. Also, I’ve been walking a lot the last few days (and getting sweaty and sticky a lot, eww) and it’s nice to have an off-day, even on vacation. I also could use the time to plan out my next couple weeks a bit more clearly, I figured.

Lastly, it was actually going to rain this afternoon and evening, possibly even thunderstorms, with 100% certainty according to Google, so night markets seemed to be off the table anyway. Thankfully it looks like the rain is going to be tapering off by checkout time tomorrow.

Still, I went out for a couple of meals at least. I passed this interesting-looking mini outdoor market on one of the streets around my lodging and Songjiang Market that I had not seen until now.

Breakfast was porridge again, at yet another random warm shop within the labyrinthine maze of little roads near my lodging:

The porridge bowl was deeper than it looked, and basically went all the way down to the table. It was quite a bit.

The old couple who tended the store had the TV on for the patrons to watch, but the old woman was busy playing some sort of browser game between making meals for customers:

I thought that was really cute. Then, on the way back, I passed what looked like a little neighbourhood altar in someone’s shop garage.

I went back to the hotel room after that and drank like 8 cups of tea. I also bought two more of those fancy 7-Eleven sandwiches and had them for lunch. They were both good! But the Japanese Roasted Chicken & Egg one was weird, because instead of both sandwiches containing some chicken and some egg, one’s filling was entirely chicken and the other entirely egg! What the heck.

But on and off through the day, possibly due to being cooped up in my air-conditioned room, I felt my body temperature wavering too, like going hot and cold in a very dangerous pre-sickness sort of way. This worried me because the destination airports will sometimes often check one’s temperature after landing. I decided that the best way to combat this was to go out again for dinner, except I wore a facemask this time. And since it wasn’t raining yet by the time I left, I decided to go find a random night market anyway to complete my streak. I picked a small night market called Gongguan Night Market somewhere to the south of me and rode a bus there. Definitely wasn’t going to walk there in my condition and under the threat of a thunderstorm though.

As night markets go, this was pretty awful. This was all the night market street there was:

And that’s it! It was one short street with stalls. Many of the carts I saw were identical to the ones I saw on other, larger markets, and I’ve pretty sure the milk cart was 50 yuan in other markets but 70 at this one.

There were a good number of shops in a district around the mini night market still, and it was right by a train station which is also nice for convenience, but the night market was tiny and expensive. The district around the market looked like this:

Honestly not bad but a little generic at this point, or maybe I’m a little jaded since I’ve seen a lot of streets and regular shops at this point!

Nearby, there was also a neat market called Shuiyuan Market, found via following this sign pointing to the right:

A gallery of pictures of this two-storey market follows.