I turned out to not have many indoor pictures, and of those that I did have, some are shops, some are interesting things I wanted to buy but didn’t, and some are giant rabbits, walking robots, and grown men being driven around on a little kids’ train. Kel had also shown me a couple miniature houses that she had, and I was really tempted to buy a couple from the shop above, especially after I went away to look at the prices online and found that the in-shop prices were actually pretty good. We’ll see.

I kind of want those for my future house. It’s not too early to shop for decorations, right?

I stopped for lunch along the way, at some slightly overpriced restaurant. Lunch was something that translated into Sautéed Garlic Vermicelli Shrimp, from a restaurant called Nine Mao Nine, and looked like this:

It wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t a big pile for 45 RMB ($9 CAD or so), though I appreciated the little glob of garlic on top of each prawn. I didn’t appreciate that large jug of tea which they put down on my table and then charged me 3 yuan (60 cents) for automatically in my virtual cart (this restaurant took orders via scanning a QR code on the table and then picking options from there) though. Also, the food took forever to come.

While waiting, I snuck a picture of the patron next to me:

The reason was that I had seen a couple restaurants giving out plastic gloves as part of the available utensil set, but I had no idea why until I saw her eating with it — it looks like the gloves were there for people to pick up food and eat it without actually dirtying their hands. Huh.

Also, while I didn’t buy any of those miniatures, I did stop by a store called O.C.E. and buy a little pink dinosaur plushie after lunch.

It also looks a lot like my shirt from Taiwan a few days ago.

Sort of. Practically identical. Isn’t she too cute? I might call her Bocchisaur. Her neck wobbles back and forth a little.

There was also a small market street with food stalls outside one of the shopping malls:

Kel and I would walk by here on the way home again much later that night, and at that point it looked like this:

It’s night.. market.. ish?

I had arranged with Kel to meet her in the area for dinner around 7:30 to 8:00 pm or so, but I had no idea where to actually eat up until an hour or so before then, when I found a weird multi-level food complex.

‘

This place had a main building with four storeys of shops, about 95% of them restaurants, surrounding a central courtyard and a large central building that I never did figure out the purpose of. The restaurants looked like they were arranged with the cheaper stuff on the lower floors and the more expensive stuff on the higher floors, but a good number of the shops, especially on the higher floors, were also closed.

One of the shops on the top floor, which Kel said was a famous chain store but which I had never heard of, sent someone to accost me the moment I arrived on the fourth level via escalator to ask (in Cantonese, then in Chinese when I looked at him blankly) how many people were in my party even though I wasn’t in their restaurant yet and there were other stores on the level, and I had to explain that I was just walking around. That store did have interesting handheld block game consoles on each table though.. what were those for I wonder?

And wait, translating that thing on the table says you can get discounts on your food by folding paper cranes while waiting for the food to arrive? Maybe the block game is tied in to that too. What the heck. That’s interesting.

But we didn’t eat there. Fourth level restaurants were too pricey for my blood. Instead, I paid with my blood as I walked around lower levels together with a good number of other people and lazily-buzzing flies. I took a few pictures of shop menus for Kel to muse over while she made her way over:

And then bought four baos, two of two different types so there was one for each of us, for 10 RMB from a random shop while waiting for her to arrive:

I bought two of the first one in the left column, handmade fresh meat baos, and two of the second-last one in the right column, char siew sourdough baos. They were pretty good, not the juiciest I’ve ever eaten or anything, and probably not super fresh since the sun had set by then and he just opened up a large steamer cover to reveal a half-empty steamer and plucked my chosen ones out of there (and these were the last char siew ones). But they were still cheap and decent, and did not seem to give me digestive troubles the following day or anything like that.

I admired the night city aesthetic and architecture while chewing on my buns and waiting for Kel to arrive:

And then once we met up, we walked around a bit on the lower level of the food plaza and decided to ignore all my suggestions and eat at this steamboat/hotpot place instead:

Kel taught me that there’s an app that I believe is called 大众点评 or Dianping, owned by a company called Meituan, the premier food delivery company here in China. Apparently a lot of restaurants sign up on that app, which handles things like reviews as well as food ordering, and she regaled me with a story about how she got a free dish from a restaurant once by giving them a nice English review on the app because then the restaurant would look more attractive to foreigners on it. Hah. I should totally set it up… (but I haven’t).

She also said that sometimes you’d find hidden off-menu items there. Like in this case for this restaurant, where she found a combo package for some of their (less popular?) meats and vegetables for 138 yuan (about $27 CAD) for two people. Score! That’s what we picked, and it went quite well, and reminded the both of us of our Chinese New Year dinners at home with the rest of the family.

There was some cow brain in there too, two pieces, one for each of us. If I start making cow puns, the parasites got me.

We also bought some sort of cold herbal tea, and thank goodness that we did because some of the spicy soup, which wasn’t actually normally spicy to me, went down my wrong throat pipe at one point, and that burned exactly like how it probably burns going down the right way for a normal person.

We were the second last table out of the door that night, and we saw a woman with a couple of dogs terrorizing a cat and prancing around the near-empty food street at that point.

I hope someone picked up the piece of poop that was laying in the middle of the street and that we had to step around. We went back up to the nearest intersection, where we saw some sort of police commotion going on.

We couldn’t get a Didi ride from there, the equivalent of Uber in China, since the app correctly identified that there was a block on that road and it was impassible. So we walked past that night market street again above to another street, and took a car home from there. Didi (Uber) is apparently really popular and cheap in China, as is Meituan (Skip the Dishes/Uber), partly because there’s no tipping culture in China at all, and if for some reason you want to tip your delivery person Kel said that you had to jump through quite a few hoops in the app to even find that page. It cost the two if us around $4-5 CAD to get home, whereas it would have cost about $1 each, I think, plus take about three times as long, to get there via public transit.

It was late at that point though, and we still had another piece of business to take care off before Kel could go to bed — she was going out of town from Friday evening to Sunday evening, and so she wanted to exile me somewhere too. We had juggled a few possible options yesterday, but by tonight had settled on Xiamen, in nearby Fujian province, instead. That was still a 4 and a half hour train ride each way though, and she helped me book the tickets for the train, but the outgoing train ride ended up with me having a ticket for a center seat, whereas the return train ride gave me an aisle seat like we had requested instead. We also found a cheap hotel in the middle of what hopefully is their equivalent of downtown. Neither of us had ever been there before, but we didn’t want to spend a whole bunch of extra time researching since it was late, so we went with that hotel and the couple of train tickets that she had found, and then called it a night soon after.

I had Kel book all these things for me because she had the extra money in her bank account to do so, whereas I knew that my funds were getting low and I didn’t want to dip into my $6,000 reserve fund just yet. On the flip side, doing it this way would also allow Kel to pseudo-convert her Chinese yuan into Canadian dollars and skip the foreign currency exchange fee to do so, since I’d just deposit the Canadian dollar equivalent of this into her Canadian bank account in a couple months once I get the current credit card bills out of the system and have disposable cash again from my biweekly paychecks.

Anyway, mooving on.