Planes, Trains, Boats, Magnetic Levitation, Buses...all in 24 hours

03122016

Woke up early for a complicated route to the next step of our trip. We packed up and checked out of the hotel, swiping all the complimentary tea, coffee and toothpaste we could on the way out.

We headed to Hangzhou East railway station, which is not the one we came in through. We had to take the subway there, and given that we were leaving mainland china we wanted to use up all of our CNY. We took a "slow train" to Shanghai rather than the highspeed rails, it was cheaper, so we could spend more money on the route from the train station to the airport.

The slow trains are the older trains, the seats are described as "hard seats", "hard sleeper" and "soft sleeper" we went with the hard seats. The train station appeared as many of the Chinese stations do, very new and modern, the train was older, still in working order, but clearly worn, the passengers were more authentic Chinese. These were the Chinese citizens that paid 4USD to get to Shanghai fr the weekend, rather than 24USD.

There were a few smelly passengers (overall hygiene standards everywhere we were in China met with what we were used to, but it was clear that there are some areas of China that are either unable to meet "western" standards, or unawares all together), we were fortunate enough to get put in one of the last of the cars (there were atleast 16).

Being that these train cars were 20 or more years old, they reeked of cigarettes, no one was actively smoking on the train (i think it is prohibited) but it smelled very heavily of it.

The train got is into Shanghai a little early, I guess there werent many passengers getting on/off at intermediate stops. We took to subway to the MAGLEV to get to the airport.

The MAGLEV was a little pricey, but it got us there in 8 minutes 40 seconds. And more importantly we had seats, which is never a sure thing on the subway. It was really cool, we travelled at 300km/h, apparently the thing is capable of commercial speeds of over 400km/h.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train

The Shanghai Pudong Airport is also huge, on par with Seoul Incheon. We were checking in, and our flight was getting delayed, so they bumped us to an earlier flight (eventually our originally ticketed flight was cancelled). We are travelling with only backpacks, to expedite travel, so we neednt check bags. The ticket agent asked if we had any luggage, nope, just our backpack we responded. She then asked us to wiegh the bags...they were over twice the "limit" for carryons.

We were not ready to part with our bags, we had cash stashed away, our electronics, our books for airplane reading. They were not going to let us on the plane with our bags. So we gathered what we could, taking extra care to ensure we had the phone numbers for our Travel Insurance...

Later on, when we got on the plane i could not help but notice all of the people with their HARD SIDE ROLL-ON SUITCASES. When I saw this, i started crafting my complaint for the airlines.

Before boarding we stopped at another one of the Priority Pass Lounges, they didnt have food as nice as the one in Seoul, but they did have beer. And we drank beer, and ate instant noodles. I ate no less than 3 cups of Shin Ramyun cuo noodles, and we had a good 4 Heinekens in the hour we waited for our flight.

We did board our flight, and promptly fell asleep.

Waking up in the Special Economic Zone that is Hong Kong, we exited our flight, and entered customs without issue, and claimed our bags. Everything seemed to be fine (and now a day later, still have not noticed anything awry).

We hopped a bus right outside the airport, that basically took us to our hotel, checked in, enjoyed the full blown google-included internet and discovered a cell phone in the room waiting for us.

The hotel provides a cellphone for its guests. This phone has internet, mapping, and preloaded important numbers; the hotel; the police; consumer protection, tourist info, some other good numbers, it has some applications to help you shop. Also it has ads, but it is really great having an ACTIVE phone while oot-n-aboot.

We found a diner-esque restaurant nearby. Ate a bunch of greasy Asian food, and wandered around the neighborhood. Turns out there is a major university in this area, and on this particular saturday, a christmas bar crawl. So the bars were slammed with people, many of them in costume.

after wandering about, we got a little lost on the way home, but obviously found it (cause we didnt sleep under a freeway overpass) i updated the blog, took a shower and went to sleep.

Some cultural nuances I will never understand

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.

Another Mountaintop Temple, and unexpected tea field tour

1122016

First full day of Hangzhou, enjoyed our fancy hotel bed, and set off.

Laura did some research, identified a Pagoda on a hill, a restaurant, and temple to see. So we set off.

We walked around more of the lake in the day time.

and found our way to the pagoda ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baochu_Pagoda ). As we were approaching the approach to the pagoda, we realized we were hungry, so before climbing a mountain, we turned around and retraced our steps looking for restaurants.

Unfortunately our hunger led us astray once again. We chose a restaurant that looked ok at a cursory glance, but it turned out to be lackluster. We got a chicken dish, which was 30% bones (i didnt even realize chickens had that many bones), and a cabbage and pork dish, that had a flavor niether of us really liked. The best part of the meal was the 2CNY bowl of rice, and the drink. We got a jug o pawpaw milk, because we had no idea what it is. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba ) turns out this fruit is actually native to North and South America. We thought we were eating something exotic…

Also this lunch was 150CNY, which is all the more disappointing.

Full of chicken bones and unpleasant pork, we set up the hill to pagoda.


the Pagoda itself was neat, and an engineering marvel, given that it is on top of a hill, but ultimately it was something to draw us to the mountaintop. the paths around the pagoda are literally carved out of the rocks which was really cool, we wandered around more, found a Taoist Temple.

and surrounding the temple is the rock sculptures we have seen elsewhere, but honestly the top-of-a-mountain thing made these more impressive.

We then made our way back down to the lake and began walking around to the temple and restaurant.

unfortunately the trek was furthur and i anticipated, and it didnt seem we were going to make it to the temple before it closes, so we decided on just dinner. The restaurant (link here) appears on the Apple maps, AND the tourist map we snagged from the hotel, so we are sure it existed.

we walked down the street it was allegedly on, and could not find it, so we turned back cut in one of the side roads, that seemingly took us ONTO the lake. This road wound around, and we say many men in hard hats coming the other way, we turned down one street, and a little old lady immediately waved us away. Clearly she knew there was nothing back there for westerners. We walked around, and found ourselves in the middle of a Tea field.

this was pretty cool, and all of the workers were as enthralled by us walking through there as we were to see the tea fields.

we walked around some more, seeing where all these workers were coming from (seemingly collecting the apples they get at the end of the day, maybe their wages too) and found the back end of the restaurant we were looking for.

Turns out, the cut in the foliage that would have brought us to the front of the restaurant was about 25m further down the road that we turned around on 30 minutes before.

The restaurant was really cool

we came in, the staff was very friendly, and showed us to a table, then as we sat down, another staff member got us up and walked us to the door. we thought we were getting kicked out for a second, but then realized we were supposed to point at the pictures on the wall to order, because they knew we werent going to navigate the menu sheet by ourselves.

We saw on the menu, under the pork we really wanted was 400 and some characters that we obviously couldnt read...holyshit we just walked into a fantastically expensive restaurant, or we are ordering half a pig…

perusing more of the menu, we saw some more agreeable numbers. we thought maybe the credit card can get us through (we got a good high limit on that fancy travel card), no luck, they dont take card…

i looked a little harder, and tried to google translate it, grams…

that is HOW much food we get not the price, the price is on the menu sheet. i ask to see the menu sheet, and see very acceptable prices.

so we go ahead and order the pork, a lamb shank, a green bean dish, a fruity drink and a flower tea.

everything was superb. The pork was great, had a nice crusty spiced skin, and plenty of fat. The beans were sauteed with garlic and ground pork and chili peppers. and the lamb was great, a huge leg of lamb

pictured above

had all kinds of spices and lamby flavor. The fruity drink was papaya and pomegranate, and the tea was chrysanthemum, and laura said it was nice, i think it tasted mostly like burnt water, but i guess i just lack a refined palette.

To finish the dinner we got an order of the peanut ice we had the other week, and this time it was even better than that, and it was pretty great the first time.

This whole dinner came out to 168CNY, so completely made up for the shitty lunch.

We hopped the bus right outside the restaurant back to the downtown area. Following the lake back home we stumbled onto a large crowd of people (even by Chinese standards a big crowd) gaggling around.

Turns out they were waiting for a watershow. The watershow was pretty neat.

Another point i forgot to make earlier, China, China gives no fucks, they have no railings around the lake, there were no railing up or down the mountain we climbed. Despite the gaggling, the lack of safety, and the general inability of the average Chinese citizen to queue properly, no one was pushed in the lake while watching the show.

we then made our way home, had a soak in the fancy tub, finished the last of the beer we got in Suzhou, and turned in for the night.

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.