I woke up today at a normal time, feeling better than when I went to bed yesterday, but still slightly chilly and under the weather. I figured that part of it was because my sleep was a little fitful due to the bed being really hard, so I took my Tigey and phone and went outside to the couch to nap for a couple of extra hours instead.

After said couple extra hours, I pulled myself out of bed and surveyed the damage. It was raining outside, and would be raining the entire day, and I had pretty much ignored laundry while I was in Xiamen, so I needed to do that, which meant no going out anyway since I only have the one skirt with me. When travelling by myself, I did my laundry in the evening and then hoped it was dry by the morning, which it usually was due to hanging the laundry up by the air-conditioning or heater, but I hadn’t done that last night due to how late I came back, and today felt like a good day for it while I recovered from the sickness. I did notice that I was still feeling cold from my feet touching the floor, but was otherwise mostly fine chills-wise, though not perfect yet.

I lumped everything into the washing machine, then sat down to work on the blog, my work tickets for the next day, and to listen to the Oilers defeat the Canucks in game 7 of their NHL playoff series. Around noon time, I made a big bowl of hot, instant noodles, and sweated buckets while eating that, enough so that my fever/chills finally broke and went away. I was perfectly fine after that again, though hopefully not fine enough to jinx my health yet again.

A new charger that Kel ordered from Taobao had arrived while I was in Xiamen, and upon testing it today, I quickly figured out that the power brick/charger was not the problem, which leaves just the battery in the laptop as the culprit for my woes. The laptop also drained down to 0% while I was trying to find a suitable position for either charger to charge the laptop. I eventually found one, but it was definitely very stressful watching the battery dip and drain down to 6% (at which point it immediately dips to 0% and the machine shuts off), especially since it’s a lot harder to test whether a charger position is working or not when the laptop is off, since the white charging indicator light is unreliable at this point.

Eventually I did manage to make it work though, but not before I left the house in a huff to get some food, since the afternoon was turning into evening by that point and enough of my clothes had dried that I could put on some decent stuff before heading out. The rain had largely abated, though it was still drizzling slightly, and I circled the Clifford Wonderland area in a counter-clockwise direction along the street-level shops that lined what seemed to be the edge of the high-rise estates, as I had not been that way yet.

I also wanted to give a shoutout to the Guangzhou metro train symbol, which definitely totally do not look like they’re plagiarized from anywhere.

I had dinner in this shop, a little restaurant next to a McDonalds:

And my meal was roast duck and char siu with rice and some soup.

This was pretty darn good and cost just 25.90 RMB, or just around $5 CAD, depending on which way one is doing the conversion. Because I don’t have many pictures for this blog post, I also wanted to showcase an example of what ordering looks like here in Guangzhou, in the specific use case where each seat at a table is numbered and has a QR code that one can scan to open up a menu.

These are rather nice because I don’t need to know too much Chinese or interact with people in order to make my order. I just sit down, scan the QR code with the WeChat app to open it in the WeChat app (so it’s attached to my WeChat Pay account), and screenshot things I don’t understand so that I can Google Translate it.

This is nice doubly because I had the impression from meeting overseas Chinese that a lot of people knew how to speak English too, perhaps not to the level of Singapore where English is the primary language and Chinese is the secondary, but enough to at least communicate, since nearly all the Chinese who go overseas are decently good at English, unlike the Japanese, who struggle like heck to adapt at first. This is not true though, at least not in the subset of people whom I have had to interact with, whether it be restaurant staff, hotel staff, random shop vendors, ticket vendors, and so on. Barely anyone actually speaks English, which is weird. Perhaps I’m just not in the right city or right social stratosphere for it.

I went home after that and chilled with Kel who came home an hour and change after me. We chatted a bit, then figured out how to use her television, which apparently she had not used in a long time. It required hooking it up to her WiFi network, which unlocked access to a bunch of “free” content with aggressive commercials. Of particular interest, we ran into a song called (or translated to) A Life of Numbers (local), which as I take it is an equivalent meme to the 867-5309 song famous in the western world. It was fascinating to watch it being performed (to the tune of some classical music songs), and then learn about its history.