Hangzhou - Paradise on Earth

Darleen, Christian and I left Shanghai for Hangzhou Sunday evening. We had to do one of those dashes through the train station that you see on TV. We weren’t late, but we certainly weren’t early either. Unluckily, we had to ride the entire train ride backwards because of our choice of seats. It wasn’t too fun. But we tried to sleep it off during the under 2 hour ride.

Once we arrived in Hangzhou, we were surrounded by taxi drivers who wanted to take us to our destination. Totally trying to gyp us because we were foreigners. They told us that they could take us to Hangzhou Dianzi University for 100RMB. Uh, no. Patricia had told us that it’s about a 30RMB ride. We were feeling very discouraged until a guy was nice enough to tell us that we should walk a little down the street where there were real cab drivers who could take us to the University for about 30RMB.

Once at the University, we sat around and caught up with Jessica and Patricia. They had not seen much of the other MAIS people because they’re in Hangzhou so they were excited to hear all the Shanghai stories. Darleen, Christian and I had planned on finding a hotel to stay at but because of the holiday and because Darleen had forgotten her form of ID we had to be illegal in Hangzhou. China has this policy where foreigners have to be registered with the local police whenever they move to a different province, even for a few days. So we called up Jing and asked her if we could use her apt for the 2 days.

The next day we hit up the West Lake area. This is the must see place in Hangzhou. And it certainly was! There were crowds of tourists milling about and traffic was pretty bad. We had a difficult time getting a taxi. We had to separate into two taxis and I did one of those, “Follow that cab!” moments. We had just pointed to a place on the West Lake map and decided that that would be a good place to go. However, once we got to the Lingyin Temple, we saw that we had to pay a fee so we walked around for a little bit instead. While we were walking around, we saw cable cars that would take you to the top of Northern Peak. We agreed that was more worth our money, so up we went!

This is the view from the top of the peak.





After coming back down, we walked around the lake and enjoyed the scenery. I highly recommend visiting Hangzhou’s West Lake if you ever get the chance to come to China. We also randomly wandered into the West Lake Expo Museum. Which was actually interesting. There were some artifacts (probably replicas) from when West Lake held a mini-expo. We even stood atop a map and pretended to be Godzilla. After playing at West Lake, Patricia took us to a place she knew where you could do bargain shopping. I’m not very good at it, but it was still fun walking through all the random stores.

The next day we felt like we should do something “cultural” so that we could show people that we didn’t just go to Hangzhou to shop. We looked through the travel book and found another free museum, China’s National Silk Museum! whoohoo!! It actually turned out to be pretty interesting as well. At the end of our museum walk, we even took the time to paint some silk handkerchiefs. I don’t remember who has those pics of us painting. While we were painting, crowds of Chinese people would gather around us to watch “the foreigners” paint. They would sometimes even discreetly (or not discreetly) take pictures. I overheard one lady tell her friend, “here’s the camera, I’m going to stand behind her and look over her [Christian] shoulder and you take the picture.”

The plan after the museum was to go to the shopping place again, but because we had such a difficult time getting a taxi again, we eventually had to just head back to the University to grab some dinner in order to make it to the train station in time. On the ride back (I had switched train tickets with Patricia because I thought that her ticket would get home faster but it turned out it took longer because there were stops vs. the original ticket I had was non-stop) I sat next to a girl named Lily. And the two of us had a nice conversation. She was just as interested in life outside of China as I was about life inside of China. Some of the topics we talked about were Chinese and American politics, the Beijing Olympics, Taiwan, the One-Child Policy and old people. It was cool because this was the first time I was able to have this type of discussion with a Chinese person.

After a quick two days in Hangzhou, it was back to the hustle and bustle of Shanghai. Patricia came back with us, so we tried to do some of the sight-seeing things around town. That will be posted another time.