杭州 Hang Zhou

So, I am going to blame this latest bout of blogging lateness on my midterms...

On April 9th and 10th I went with all the foreign students at my university to 杭州 (Hang Zhou) A city around four hours by bus from Shanghai.

We were really lucky. We went from a really ugly portion of spring with, honestly, record breaking amounts of rain (which lead to the destruction of several of my shoes) to really beautiful weather.

I am completely in awe of the organizational skills of my school. We have all been on school trips where they try to take 60 kids in two or three buses somewhere for a few hours and loading up the buses takes as long as the rest of the trip just to get everyone on the bus and accounted for.

The Hua Shi Da staff managed to load seven buses of foreign students who's only common language was broken Chinese with baggage and passports and bus us around for two days without us ever feeling the delay. We even got in and out of a hotel (of which we occupied three floors) without a hitch.

The first day we went to a beautiful set of gardens. It turns out that they were the same gardens that I stopped at with my host family when we were driving back from our travels during Spring Festival, but they couldn't have looked more different. They were in full spring bloom and it was awesome.

Though I will have to admit I was paying more attention to my classmates that they surroundings. I am in class with a bunch of goofballs from around the world and traveling with them is a complete blast. We spent the day riding around in boats, eating ice cream, trying on traditional straw hats, and generally frolicking around like idiots.

We had the evening free. First I went out to dinner with the rest of the CIEE crowd one of my classmates and his friends who are also Lillian's classmates. We went for traditional Hang Zhou style food which was all really really good. After we had sat through the meal for a good long time, chatted for a while, made sure all the plates were clean, and plaid the bill we decided to get up and leave. However as we put on our jackets and got ready to go the waiter comes running up and says "wait but don't you want your duck???" "Duck???" we thought... It turns out that Jeff had ordered a duck and forgotten about it... so there was nothing to do but go back and eat the duck ^^,

Hangzhou is famous for bordering on 西湖 (Xi Hu) or west lake. Our hotel was only a few blocks from the lake so decided to walk down to the lake and see what it was like at night. Unfortunately the lake had bats... Lillian is deathly afraid of bats... She dealt with it though so we kept strolling. It was really nice to be somewhere with some natural beauty, because although Shanghai is awesome natural beauty is not its forte.

As we were walking along the edge of the lake we started to hear music. It turned out that in the square ahead of us there were a couple hundred Chines people line dancing. Going with my newly adopted life policy "why not do it?" I managed to convince Lillian that it was necessary for us to go join in the massive Chinese line dance, which we then did. I'm not sure that anything quite that entertaining had ever happened in Hangzhou before. So we stood and watched for a few minutes to get the hang of it and then jumped in. That of course was the cue for the music to change to double time. I have to admit that after years of ballet Lillian was definitely better than I was, but I had a blast nonetheless.

After we had walked around for a while longer we sat down at a lakeside cafe and got ice cream while we sat and chatted. Then we headed back to the hotel. Megan went to sleep and I went to visit some of my Korean classmates from lass semester who I hadn't seen in a while.

We had heard that Hangzhou had a great midnight snack street so Lillian and I decided that we needed to take advantage of it. We got the hotel to write out the address and grabbed a taxi out to the street. It turned out to be more a street of tiny restaurants. They all seemed to be specializing in craw fish, and there were massive tubs of live craw fish outside the restaurants, so of course we had to give it a try. I don't know where all the people came from but despite it being around one in the morning on a Thursday/Friday all of these restaurants were full. There was a little table for two crammed between two bigger tables that was open in one of the more popular places, so we grabbed it when we could. We ended up with a massive bowl of craw fish between us and some chopsticks. We looked at the massive bowl of whole craw fish, we looked at the chopsticks, we looked at each other, then we reached over and snagged the box of tissues of the table next to us and went to town.

I don't really understand it but all the Chinese people where eating the craw fish with a very minimal amount of mess, while Lillian and I were practically bathing in them. In can deal with a whole crab with my chopsticks, I can peal a shrimp in my moth, but I have yet to figure out how to eat a craw fish without my hands... oh well... They were delicious, and I was wearing black...

We went back to the hotel and I went to Lillian's room and met a few of her classmates which was fun before heading off to bed.

Far too few hours later we headed off for day two. We drove around the lake to the official tourist visit portion of the lake and had essentially a free day to take in the lake. I hung out with Megan, Nate, and Jonas. First we saw that across from where we were dropped off there was a bike rental place that had a sign up saying bike rental for 1 kuai (about 14 cents) we thought that was a good idea. So began "mission bicycle." We went over to inquire about renting bikes and the woman in charge said that she had bicycles, but no cards that you needed to rent bikes but if we went to the next rental station up the road they might have some. So we did. Rinse and repeat... Four bike rental stations later one of the people told us that the only place with cards was the place at the front of the park. At that point we demanded to know why. Her answer: "I don't know, it doesn't make any sense to me, but the boss says so..." We finally made it to the place at the front of the park only to be informed that although we could rent the bike for one kuai we would need to pay 300 in various deposits... So ended "mission bicycle"

It turned out fine though, because from there we wandered back into the park and our small hike had taken us off of the main tourist track so we had a little breathing room to walk. We ended up renting a boat and boatman to take us around the lake which was absolutely lovely.

Finally we grabbed some lunch and hopped back on the buses to head home.

I seem to have misplaced my Hangzhou pictures so if you want to see them they are posted on my facebook. I am now going to head to the gym. When I get back if I am feeling like a really good person I will write about My trip to Hunan which I left for two days after I got back from Hangzhou.

TTFN