A couple of bookkeeping items. Firstly, I took a look at my return ticket from Xiamen to Guangzhou and it looks like I have an aisle seat with the letter C, which I am actually guessing is the aisle seat in the group of 3 seats in a row instead of the aisle seat in the group of 2 seats across the aisle. However, Kel thinks that the train will be a lot emptier because it’s a weekday (and a weekday night at that) train instead of a weekend one, so we shall see.

Secondly, I would like to sincerely apologize to Clifford Wonderland for calling it a dead mall/amusement park. I mean, it absolutely still is, but compared to the actual dead mall I visited today, it’s paradise on Earth. I did also do some research on the history behind that Clifford Wonderland area and it looks like it’s owned by a company or conglomerate or something called Clifford Group, and there’s a Chinese Wikipedia article on the area itself here.

Also, today will be gallery heavy because there’s a chunk in the middle that I just don’t have much to comment on, yet it was so vivid to me that I wanted to keep most of the pictures here anyway.

Lastly, room service came by just after noon again, and emptied my bins as well as replaced my towels and toothbrush again. The toothbrushes are really wasted here at this Echarm Hotel, they’re not even really disposable toothbrushes, they’re full-sized ones that come in a little sealed package with a small tude of toothpaste. Even the toothpaste could easily last 3-4 days before being thrown away by room service and replaced with a new tube. It’s very renewable-unfriendly.

In addition, my room voucher that Kel booked for me through trip.com says that it’s supposed to come with “Delightful afternoon tea (exclusive from 14:00-16:00)” amd “Silent night (“Eye*Translation Wonderful” eye mask, earplugs)”, and yes, those symbols are all part of what my email pdf receipt says. That tea sounds suspicious and definitely isn’t something I’m ever around for anyway even if it is a thing, but there’s definitely no eye mask or earplug in the room that I can see.

Also also, I forgot to mention this two days ago, but WiFi in this place is a single network that I had to connect to, and I had to pretty much guess the password for it since there were two different passwords listed, one on my room card holder and another one on the tissue box in my room. Even after doing that though, the WiFi required a visit to a webpage to activate, and while the username for that was the room number again, the password for THAT was not listed anywhere and so I had no idea if the username was correct or not since it just returned a generic error. In the end, I had to call room service for it on the first evening that I arrived, and then the receptionist on the other side of the line could not speak English at all.

I managed to explain my problem through broken Chinese anyway and she said to bring the laptop down to the reception counter so they could help me set it up. And even then, the woman that tried to put in the password for the WiFi network login page had it wrong at first, and the other woman at the reception desk who had more of a clue had to come to her aid to finally get the WiFi to connect. Once it connected it was about average, it usually was serviceable but sometimes has slow stretches that make everything lag regardless of whether I have a VPN on or not.

The pillows are also just piles of shapeless cotton. Yech. I wonder how old they are. At least I have four of them to stack up. I’ve still been furiously scanning for bugs but have seen none so far except a fly that got in on the first evening but has been missing in action since. No sign of bedbugs yet… I think.

Finally, I’m a little bit road-weary, and starting to get tired of travelling and being out on the road for so long. Though the laptop woes have definitely influenced that and so have my recent sickness (which I am completely cured of now). Unless I feel better about it, I think I’ll do Hong Kong for maybe 5 days after China, and then Singapore for a week and a bit, and then go home. Maybe Malaysia for 1-2 days in between. So if I stick to that schedule, two and a half more weeks to go.

Now for today’s actual adventure! I started the day with a nice, cute bowl of instant noodles again. This is cute, right?

It was allegedly going to start raining tonight and for the rest of the week after tonight, but I was also aware that there was also a chance that it was going to rain in the afternoon today, though the weather card turned up cloudy and overcast but rainless. Due to that threat though, my aim was to look for an indoor shopping mall to walk around in, and one that came up was the mention of a very large but dead mall and amusement park area called Mingfa Shopping Mall, owned and operated by some entity called the Mingfa Group, the same way that Clifford Wonderland was owned and operated by the Clifford Group. It looked like it was on the east side of Xiamen too, so it would give me an excuse to travel and walk a bit since I had mostly concentrated on the west side of the city thus far. It was also supposedly huge, like supposedly over 4 million square feet of space, though I expect that that counted mall levels on top of each other too.

But first, lunch. I started my adventure by walking around my local Zhongshan Road neighbourhood again, except I went a little west because I had not gone that way yet, since the metro station was to the east and south and there were a lot of roads and shops in that direction as well. West showed me an emporium or something that I didn’t enter, but whose name I really liked, Seashine Department Store:

And the walking road ended up in a wide open area and an actual north-south road called Lujiang Avenue, and part of the South China Sea where it goes into Xiamen West Port past that. There’s a resort island called Gulangyu out west too, and I almost booked a resort hotel on that island instead of here on the mainland, which would have necessitated taking a ferry every day to get onto the mainland to do stuff. It would have been interesting.

I also saw whatever this was sitting by the side of the road. A misting machine. These things basically create fake fog, no? Why would one of them be installed out by the side of the street? Or does this do something else?

I wandered into a little mall called Nanzhong Plaza by the side of the road as well. Despite Zhongshan Road being very active and popular, for some reason this mall right next to it had very few people in it.

I wasn’t going to eat at McDonalds though, so I wandered out and basically wandered around until, for the third day in a row, someone standing outside a restaurant called out to me and invited me to come in to their shop to eat. I indeed then went into that shop.

The guy behind that photobombing motorcycle helmet head was the restaurant owner, and he was very nice, I chatted with him a bit and told him where I was from and so on. From his shop menu, I ordered some black pepper beef rice, and a roasted pork glutinous pork dumpling.

He invited me to try his peanut soup as well, but I declined since I didn’t want to push the cost too high, as those two together already cost 42 yuan (about $8 CAD), and I felt that that was a little overpriced for the amount I got. The peanut soup would only have cost another 6 yuan or so, but still. He said the peanut soup was actually a local specialty though, and that the peanuts were basically boiled/cooked and then made into soup, and he made me a little bowl to try on the house even though I didn’t want to order a full bowl. That tiny bowl can be seen in the above picture as well. That was super nice of him, so I gave him one of my many remaining Edmonton postcards before I left!

On the way to the station, I saw this poor sign that had fallen over and was probably in the process of being removed.

It was what seemed to be the 109th anniversary sign that I had seen a couple of days ago.

Or was it a 19th anniversary sign? Either way I guess it was over now.

Upon reaching the station, I took an example picture of a girl in a nice white dress, one of a handful of girls in nice white dresses that I had mentioned seeing in the area over the past few days. They’re so pretty.

It’s such a thing around here that I even found a sign about it at the bottom of the stairs, in the train station proper:

Pay Attention When Wearing Long Dress. Huh. Soft Shoes, too.

Following my map app, I took the train to Lücuo Station, transferred to another train, and rode it to Lingdou Station. I almost missed it due to nodding off on the train but got off just in time. The map was leading me on some 15 minute walk from there, which seemed suspicious, but the weather was really nice and I like a nice walk anyway so I started to hoof it.

I stumbled onto this building along the way that looked like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a shopping mall or not:

That semi-outdoor second level there looked like a nice vantage point to take a picture from, so I went up there.

I also looked down and saw a girl in some sort of maid uniform or something interacting with a guy. I feel sure they hugged at some point, and she also posed for a picture for him at another point, both before I snuck this picture of them.

I continued walking on, passing a lot of local shops and residential areas and this group of people playing cards outside a shop:

But I was quite sure by this point that I was not headed toward where I thought I was headed — I knew the place included a ferris wheel and there was no ferris wheel anywhere in sight here, just a bunch of residential and small commercial buildings. I found out that somehow the Baidu map app had led me to some random hotel owned by the Mingfa Group instead of the mall and amusement park that I was trying to get to, and searching it again displayed a location far to the west, just a little east of the centrally-located Xiamen Railway Station that I had gone to or passed by the last two days as well.

Oops. However, plotting a route there gave raise to a new opportunity. I’d just been taking the local metro train in Xiamen so far, but Xiamen actually had a neat Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system that’s a bunch of buses running along preset routes along elevated highways that are not connected to normal roads at all. Sort of like elevated train tracks, but bus roads instead. And one of these was nearby and would apparently take me to the actual Mingfa Shopping Mall 5 stops away. Cool! I walked over to the BRT station, which was located at the other end of this overhead bridge, by those two tall residential towers:

And above this nice little market:

I wasn’t sure if the 336-city transit card that Kel gave me would work on the gates, or if it worked on actual train stations only, but it did indeed work. There was also a police checkpoint with bag scanner there at the entrance to the bus station, just like there was at every train station. The train platform was thus a secured area, and looked like this, with a different waiting area for each of the four bus routes that visited that BRT station:

What interested me the most though was the two residential buildings just behind the station. In fact, they were so close, that the apartments that were level with the station and the highway could basically be looked into, and must be nightmares to live in. Why were these buildings so close to the station and elevated road?

The interior of the bus looked like this. There was no buzzer or bell or anything like that on the bus to signal a stop, presumably like a regular train it stops at every stop regardless of whether anyone is there to alight or disembark from the bus.

Anyway, I finally reached the station after five stops, and this definitely looked like the correct place from what I could see:

Mingfa Shopping Mall supposedly had a somewhat active ground floor still, while the second and third floor and the amusement park section were both mostly abandoned. From what I read, it was also in a very poor, dilapidated condition. This seemed to be accurate — these are pictures from the bottom level, which was a partially outdoor, partially indoor maze of corridors that saw the occasional motorcycle zoom by, dodging pedestrians: