Breakfast was a bowl of instant porridge and a bowl of instant noodles — the latter was sauerkraut and nice though I didn’t take a picture of it, but instant noodle bowls all look identical anyway. The former was decent, though not as nice as that Korean convenience store porridge that I had 9 and 10 years ago and that I can still find in an overpriced fashion in the H-Mart Korean supermarket back in Edmonton.

I stayed back at the hotel between breakfast and lunch, finishing my work for the week, then being very frustrated at the laptop for and its charger for not being able to hold a charge. I think it’s the battery and not a charger, but Kel ordered me a battery charger brick from Taobao, the Chinese online marketplace app, anyway, and it will arrive sometime on Monday or maybe Tuesday once I return to her apartment in Guangzhou, where I left half my luggage behind while on this trip.

Sometime around noon, room service came and knocked on the door, and a lady then proceeded to change my towels, toothbrush, and added two more free bottles of water even though I had not used the first two yet. That was really quick, I hadn’t even been in the room for 24 hours yet. I wonder if they do that lately or if they just do that on specific days of the week.

I believe that all the power in the room goes off when I remove the card from the card reader from the door and head out for the day, as I came back in the evening to a laptop that was on low power, as well as a Steam Deck, which I had plugged in just before going out, that still wasn’t fully charged either. This was very annoying, and I spent half an hour in the evening moving and twisting and nudging the power cord until it found a specific angle where it could actually charge the laptop again. And then it eventually stopped charging for some reason so I had to spend another hour doing that again.

I went out and got lunch at another of the endless number of little restaurants around my hotel, this time having seafood shacha noodles and some nice fried oyster:

And here’s a shot of the shop and the proprietress.

My goal for the day was to head back toward Xiamen Railway Station, where I had arrived yesterday, as there was a labyrinth of shopping centers around there to explore and that also came up on a list of interesting shopping districts to walk around in in Xiamen. I took a different route this time though, which didn’t involve a train transfer, and instead left me at a different station on my primary train subway line, which was a 10 to 15 minutes walk away from Xiamen Railway Station. The weather was cool and windy and it was a pleasant walk past another mall that I did not enter, and a bunch of little roadside shops, on the way to the shopping district.

I love these highrise buildings set behind the shorter buildings, that sort of layering elicits so much in my imagination.

I then finally reached my destination, the Xiamen Railway Station area, where there were about maybe four malls or so and an underground shopping arcade that connected a couple of them as well as a nearby subway station. The underground mall was busy, as were the first couple levels of most of the malls, but a couple of the malls had some rather deserted corners that I wandered into, like this food area on top of one of the malls:

And whatever this somewhat pretty set up was for:

I also saw a ball pit where parents brought their children to and then sat down to rest and watch them in a really awkward fashion:

And there were several play areas in the malls that looked similar to this, which I’ve also seen elsewhere in China:

Many of the malls have children-focused areas like that, which is interesting. A lot of the malls I’ve seen are also fashion-and phone-related though, a lot more than western malls tend to be, and neither of those industries interest me at all.

A gallery of general mall and mall-adjacent pictures follow.