02122016
Another late start, damn those 5 star beds.
Laura identified activities for the day, taking a boat up the canal, and exploring a historical/tourist area in the North of Hangzhou.
We made our way to the ferry terminal via subway. the little terminal is essentially a bus stop, but on the water, the ride was 3CNY, which is much better than the 25CNY the tourist boat charges for the same route. On the boat you get to see a different view of the city, as well as its many bridges, and barges.
The canal is old, and long, infact its one of the oldest and longest in the world. It has been linking the political/administrative hubs of China in the North, with the food producing South for like 1400 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)
At first i didnt believe that the canal went ALL THE WAY to Beijing, but it does, at least the series of interconnecting canals and rivers do. It like 1100 miles, and it has had locks installed since like the Xth century, its pretty great.
The boat dumped us off just beyond that bridge, where the Hangzhou city government and Chinese government built up a large cultural heritage area. There are old-timey (in look not authenticity, this like much of China's "historical areas" have been torn down and rebuilt to be more "authentic"). There are a few museums around there, all free, so we hit as many as we could.
Our first stop was the museum about the canal itself. There was very little english, but plenty of displays. The museum went over the history of the canal and China at large, the construction methods, the way the neighborhoods and industry developed at key points and times of the canal. It also had models of the varous craft used to ply the waterways.
Pictured below is the outline of the canal on a world map
After this museum we were quite hungry, we got some meat pie things from a street vender for very little monies, and continued accross the bridge to the cultural heritage area.
This area had a number of museums, and craft workshops. I think in high season they would have artisans making things that would eventually go on sale in the shops and musuems in the immediate area. The first museum we went to was the fan museum. Which was pretty cool. Fans have been in China for a very long time, and been a part of the culture for almost as long.
This is one of the few instances where China adopted something from Japan; the Folding Fan. Prior to the Japanese introducing the folding fan (think of the asian fan you are probably already thinking of, this is a Japanese folding fan), the Chinese used round fans, made of paper or silk stretched over a bamboo frame.
After the fan musuem we went to the sword, knife and scissor museum. This one was also pretty cool, and I found more interesting than the fans. It went through the history of sharp things in China, which is pretty much the beginning of using sharp things as Humans. The Chinese developed their own bronze age independant of the west, and came to many of the same conclusions in metal working that the west did.
The Chinese were using swords as late as the Anti-Japanese War.
After the museums we wandered the cultural heritage area, got some more snacks, and headed home via ferry.
We got back to our hotel to chill out for a little while and get off our feet before going back out for dinner. We decided to try the Steam Young place. A place that specialized in steamed stuff.
We thought it would be steambuns and dumplings, and we were sorely mistaken.
Walking up the stairs to the restaurant we got a whiff of the smells that so far in China, has only been fleeting wafts of foetid odors, not entirely identifiable. Early on in less metropolitan China, it was just a quick sniff, enough to think "maybe it was just that manhole cover?" or "there was probably just a rotting animal carcass in that bush" but then in Hangzhou we got cought behind people who seemed to be exhuding this abhorrent stench.
They were eating it.
Stinky Tofu
That name doesnt do it justice. It smells like someones teeth are rotting out of their head, like drysocket, but all of them, and food stuff that got stuck in there, and not irrigated.
It is horrendous.
Anyways this place, as we went up the stairs we got a whiff, "oh shit, they serve that here?"
we order some things on the menu, Glutenous Rice with pork, Sausage, Meatballs with rice noodles, Cabbage, and Spicy Shrimp with Tofu.
Sound like reasonable things a westerner can probably eat right?
nonono
the waitress even asked us if we were sure we wanted to eat the Shrimp and Tofu, i thought she was warning us about the spice, she was not.
it hit the table and was very unpleasant, i thought "if people eat it, it has to not be that awful right? something has got to be up"
the moment i split the skin of the tofu cube the stench hit me in the face.
I have handled some pretty awful shit, mind you not burning-shit-pond in kandahar bad, but bad. Go back a few entries in my blog and you can read about the day i spent squeegee-ing sickly dog shit off ice in dump, this smell was worse.
NEVER have i had a food product that i couldnt even be around, having it at the table ruined the rest of the food. The residual smell on my chopsticks rendered the rest of the food a very sharp reminder that China is fucking wild.
We ate what we could, and got outta there. Tried to walk it off, but the smell literally and figuratively haunted us. We thought we smelled it around every corner, and some corners some local was eating it, and we really did smell it.
We found a fancy juice place, cleared our palettes with heavily gingered juice and headed home to pack and ready for leaving mainland China in the morning.
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