t
o
n
y
a
n
g
'
s
 
w
e
b
l
o
g


suffering a case of diarrhea, sunmeng decided to take a sick day and not go to work. things were still a little icy after what happened last saturday night, but i played along. i gave her a tablet of loperamide, which seemed to settle her digestive problems, until i told her it was a year expired, and the effect sort of wore off. we went in search of some light brunch, something to calm our stomaches. around 11am we went down jianxing donglu and found a old wu wonton shop that also served breakfast porridges. we each got the thousand year old egg porridge with pork along with a serving of pan-fried dumplings and hot soy milk.

afterwards we went to miniso a few stores down. this is one of the larger miniso stores i've visited, compromising of two storefronts merged into a single store. i bought an elephant head suction soap holder. it was here that sunmeng said, "i think we're okay now," meaning the thaw in our tense relationship, but i just grunted. for me it'll take a bit longer to get back to normal!

next stop was the carrefour supermarket, which i located on a map (on jianxin xilu), and i knew one existed nearby because i saw a girl with a carrefour shopping bag a few days ago. directions said it was about a 10 minute walk from the hotel. while using the pedestrian underpass at the jianxin lu intersection, we discovered an underground shopping complex, that was nothing about clothing, shoes, accessories, makeup parlors, and surprisingly, tattoo salons. we decided to walk down the length of this underground shopping place, which would eventually lead us to carrefour. passing by an area of beauty parlors, sunmeng told me this was what she used to do in college, making some money helping other girls to put on makeup.

sunmeng showed me how to use the free storage locker at the carrefour supermarket. apparently you punch in the locker number you want, which you then get a barcoded ticket which is the key to later opening up the locker. i bought a bunch of things from carrefour, including a small bottle of wuliangye baijiu, soap, toothpaste (korean salt flavor), and baby powder (i've experienced some chafing). i also got a plastic clothesline for hanging my clothes when it comes time to doing my laundry. afterwards sunmeng stopped by a pharmacy to get some chinese diarrhea medicine, no longer trusting of my western medicine.

back at the hotel around 2pm they didn't clean our room yet. we stuck around until 2:40pm, when we heard a knocking on the door from housekeeping. we went downstairs to the 4th floor to wait. there was a pool table and we played a game. sunmeng acted like she knew what she was doing, but held the cue stick wrong and often times either completely missed the cue ball or would accidentally hit a numbered ball with the stick. i was a pro compared to her, or at the very least i could handle the stick better. we stayed downstairs for almost an hour before figuring they were probably done cleaning the room.

we went back out looking for dinner around 6:30pm. there was a duck hot pot restaurant just on the other side of the pedestrian overpass that i was curious about trying. this turned out to be the second most delicious meal i've had since my short time here in china, behind the chuan chuan hot pot i had the first night i arrived in chongqing. afterwards we took a stroll down to the guanyinqiao shopping plaza. we visited the ghost shopping mall of the rongheng time plaza.