Yeah, after Temple Street it was a bit samey. I do believe there might have been some shops down the side too, though many of the ones I noticed were closed, but also the walking path here was far, far narrower compared to Temple Street, and it was slightly difficult trying to traverse back and forth through the stalls and navigating the two single file lines of people headed in each direction while making sure no one bumped me enough to pickpocket Tigey from me. Despite all that, it was fun, I enjoy walking around markets like this even though I seldom buy anything from them. Also, unlike Temple Street, there was no street food section in this Ladies’ Market.

I did end up buying something extraneous on this trip out to the markets though. I ran into a random Linlee store along the side of the road, and picked up a cup of random lemon tea from them, as well as a pink duck! It came from a tray of mostly basic yellow ducks, but I already had a basic yellow duck, so I typed on my phone and asked the cashier if there was a way to pay more to get a special duck (in Guangzhou, the current deal when I was there was apparently to pay 3 extra yuan to get one of five special ducks, of which I ended up with one of them thanks to Kel). She shrugged and looked a bit confused at that, but there were a couple of coloured ducks in the tub of yellow ducks seated next to the window, so she pulled the pink duck out and set it next to the tray, and then the person who actually made the drink handed me the drink and that pink duck.

Here’s the price list for the drinks:

My comment on this is that in China, a lot of the drinks cost around $3 CAD, which I thought was already overpriced on its own, since there was very little actual lemon tea in each cup, but it was okay anyway since it came with a cute duck. Here, the equally small drinks cost $6 CAD each! It was no wonder that the Linlee stand had no queue when I first approached it (although a small queue formed behind me after), whereas the other random lemonade stand next to it had a 5-6 person queue waiting to be served.

Anyway, here’s the duck saying goodbye to the rest of her crew:

And then later on, back at my lodging, saying hello to Tigey.

~HELLO~.

That’s a yandere duck if I’ve ever seen one.

I took the train back south after that, and one of my modus operandi is that I sometimes like to stop one station away from my destination and then walk back, which is exactly what I did here, stopping at Admiralty Station and walking home from there instead of taking a transfer to another line to get to the nearer Wan Chai Station. I’m glad I saw that, because I ran across these amazing sights:

There were little picnic sites or something everywhere. I thought people were queueing for something at first, but then I started seeing them everywhere, in bus interchanges, stairwells, walkways, and so on, and I was very confused by this. Or was there some sort of religious event going on?

I managed to find out more about what was happening once I got home and did some Googling though. This Wikipedia article talks about the phenomenon, as does this BBC travel article (local), basically it’s largely Filipino maids, who generally get Sundays off from the families that they serve and live with, meeting up together and enjoying the day with their friends. Some were eating, some were singing to karaoke machines or radios, but most of them were just resting and chatting and putteirng away on the phone while they hung out on their picnic mats with friends and/or acquaintances, whiling the day away barefooted. It was extremely eye-opening to see, and then to think about in post-mortem once I figured out what I saw actually was. Singapore has Filipino maids hired to serve families too but I don’t think they have anything like this, at least nothing that I’ve ever seen or heard of. I wonder if other countries do.

It was also lucky happenstance that I even ran across them, since I came out through a northeast exit from Gibraltar Station and then found that I couldn’t really cross southeast from there, so I ended up circling a bus terminal and up some stairs into some walkways that crossed past a mall and over a road and that’s where most of them were located. If I had chosen another exit I probably would never have seen any of them at all, since once I was past the immediate vicinity of northeastern Gibraltar Station, there were no more of these Filipino social groups to be found. Though I did capture this guy trying to capture three girls walking away or something like that. What kind of creep loves taking pictures of other people doing things, right?

My lunch had been late so I wasn’t remotely hungry at all, and I was passing the supermarket that I had been to two days ago, so instead of dinner, I wanted to go get some ice cream to see if that would help get rid of what I essentially concluded was some sort of laryngitis. I did see this on the shelves there, which amused me as I had no idea that Netflix had branded snacks of any kind:

But popcorn wouldn’t have helped me. Instead, I bought a bottle of soya milk, as well as this small tub of ice cream:

Apparently both honey and ice cream help, so honeycomb ice cream or whatever that hokey pokey was should doubly help, right? I ate it over two sessions that evening, re-freezing It in between. It was okay, until the end, when the remnants turned into ice cream puddles that were not worth freezing up again. I spooned it up and drank it all, and it was awful. I apparently regained enough of my voice from that box to let out a hoarse, high-pitched “Yucks!” though.