Almost the very wrong city...

30112016

Woke up wayy to early, hangover was starting to set in, and i was desperately thirsty. But we cant drink right from the tap, so i had to boil water, and then cool it enough to drink. I got through a few cycles of this before Laura also woke up not feelin so hot.

We drank some water, and then actually went back to sleep for a few hours.

When we woke up for the day in actuality, we packed up quick and headed back to the train station. I had a chance to look up train schedules, there was a train that went direct from Suzhou, to Hangzhou going through a few cities including Shanghai.

We went to the train station, and asked the ticket agent for the ticket to Hangzhou, she said something, we smiled and nodded, and then she started clicking away. A guy behind us spoke up asking where we were going, we said Hangzhou, and showed him the Characters, and he asked the agent if she got that. She didnt, she was going to send us to some other city that phonetically sounds like hanzhou. The guy helped us get it straghtened out, we paid our money, and went to the terminal to wait.

The train was only stopping for 10 minutes, so everyone piled in quick, and took their seats.

The children on the train were fascinated by us, i take it they dont see westerners very frequently.

We checked into our hotel, which is very nice. I dont know if i mentioned this earlier (and i no longer have full blown internets so i cannot check) but we got a “bump” to a nicer hotel. One of the first nights of our trip, while in Japan, I got an email from hotels.com saying the hotel we booked in Hangzhou could no longer honor our booking, and we needed to call them ASAP.

We let it go for about 2 weeks, and finally called. The hotels.com customer service rep apologized that it didnt work out, and got on his system looking for a new room, he asked what our reasoning for choosing that hotel was; i explained it is for leisure, and we chose that hotel because it was close to the things to see in Hangzhou. He said the only hotel he could find was about 1 mile away, but it was a 5 star hotel, (we booked a 3 star), and asked if it would be ok if we moved there.

I asked if that would change the price, as we had a budget, he assured me hotels.com would pick up the difference.

of course we took it.

So here we are at a nice 5 star hotel, within walking distance of all the things to see in Hangzhou.

After checking in we decided to check out the local Grandmas place (see earlier post), as it sounded like this was the first one. It was as good as the other one, but we got caught up when paying (ill get to that)

The walk to the restaurant took us around some of the West Lake (the whole reason people come to Hangzhou) and it was pretty beautiful.

They refused to take our Visa card, we had 2 other Chinese patrons saying its a Visa, and it should work, but they refused to swipe it. We didnt have enough cash, so laura had to leave me as collateral and go get more monies.

Dinner wasnt expensive, we just ran out of Yuan, and figured we’d be ok cause the other place took our card.

We then went home, Laura soaked in the 5 star tub, and we went to sleep.