Cough cough, hack hack. Cue me getting sick again once my computer woes were finally(?) fixed. I partially blame the hard mattress in the room for part of this because it’s so hard that it feels like sleeping on a wooden floor, my organs feel like they’re putting gravity pressure on my body (this doesn’t happen with a regular soft or somewhat firm bed), and I feel like it’s been bad for my sinuses building up overnight, but then again I’ve also noticed that if I need to clear up blocked nose issues on the left side of my face, I can lie down on my right side and the pressure is nice for that, and vice versa for the other direction. I do wake up sore nearly every day though and am slightly glad to be moving on to another place due to that — I’m not sure how Kel does it since her bed is as firm as mine and she apparently likes it that way.

So anyway, I woke up without taste and with my voice gone again, though the taste got restored before I went out for lunch. Kel thinks I have bronchitis, possibly from bad China/Taiwan environment and/or lower personal hygiene levels of the Chinese in the cities or neighbourhoods that I’ve been overall. I don’t have any of the classic symptoms like weirdly-coloured phlegm though. We are also thinking of naming the pink dinosaur plushie a variant of the word bronchitis because it’s not too far off from brontosaurus.

I will miss Kel a lot, it’s been fun catching up and spying on how she’s living and making a mess of the house for her in general. We siblings are quite close to each other, and it’s nice to see my family more often. Kel‘s the hardest one to see since she’s always overseas (though apparently she’s coming back to Edmonton to visit in July.) I don’t see my Edmonton family enough either, though. Since they don’t live anywhere close to a train station and I don’t drive.

Today was my last full day in Guangzhou, and thus the last time I will see Kel on this trip, barring some weird turn of events. While she’s been busy during the day and usually late into the evenings from her job as a teacher, and her weekends are usually spent in Shenzhen with her boyfriend so I got banished to Xiamen last weekend, we’ve still chatted a good amount with each other, especially as night, and that has been so wonderful. She’s also helped with spacing out my travel costs a bit, by paying for some stuff now and having me pay her back later once the credit card bills from the trip have passed, hopefully without me having to dip into the backup $6,000 in my other bank account.

But the interlude is over, and it is time to move on. Or it will be after one more day of exploration, which nicely enough is also the last full day that my Holafly VPN was contracted for.

For various reasons I had not really spent much time going further afield in Guangzhou during my six days here, and so I looked up and found an anime-focused mall as well as a tourist walking and shopping street not too far away from each other, and decided to focus my efforts on that today despite the light drizzle that was popping on and off all day. Today’s blog entry pictures will largely be in galleries, it’s just one of those days with lots of pictures that do not require commentary.

This first mall I went to was called Comic City. It was notable for how the station that it connected to, Gongyuanqian Station, had a bunch of exits that went into different segments of the Comic City mall, but each mall segment seemed discrete and not really connected to the others, so much so that those entrances were also the “main” exits from those different mall segments. They probably were connected via seedy service corridors or nondescript exit doors or something, but not obviously so. What this meant was that since most/all people used the same exit to leave those mall segments, which were also entrances back into the station, and there was a police checkpoint and item scanner at each one that they had to step through each time because entering a train station in China always triggers one of those searches, in effect anyone who visited and then left even a portion of the “anime mall” was always subject to a police search, and to visit the “entire” mall seems like it would require multiple searches to do so. How weird.

Despite that, there were actually a decent number of young people wandering around here, and a number of them were even casually cosplaying as they shopped. Some examples:

There were some gothic/lolita fashion stores too, which is rare for an anime mall:

A lot of the mall was just anime figures and things like blind boxes, badges, and posters though, which was not my sort of thing. There was no store selling CDs at all, at least not in the segments I went to. The most interesting that that did happen was that I wandered into a store and the store clerk must have been on the spectrum or something, she immediately latched on to me and followed me around the store even after I shook my head at her, indicating that I was just looking. I had earphones on so I couldn’t hear anything, but I noticed that she was trying to say things to me now and then, and eventually I removed my earphones and looked quizzically at her, which made her realize that I had not heard anything she had said to me, and she went “ahhh” and looked up at the ceiling in a very exaggerated way. I demonstrated that I could not speak to her due to having lost my voice anyway, and left the store soon after. Which was a pity, because that was the only store (besides the lunch restaurant) where I considered actually making a purchase, since they had a wall of Bocchi the Rock! badges and acrylic stands. The pushy salesperson lost them the sale though.

I had eel rice for lunch from a restaurant there, it wasn’t a whole ton but what was there was actually nice. I learnt from my last trip to Kyoto that I liked eating eel quite a bit, but that it was always really pricey. This one cost 28 RMB (about $5.25 CAD) and somehow lacked a spoon to eat it with, I guess mimicking the whole Japanese experience.