China Chronicles 8/16
My webserver is STILL down, so I have no way of posting pictures. Which sucks because Hangzou is beautiful. I promise to repost this once everything works again. In the meantime, here's the text dump. Not as pretty, but put the xbox down and use yer imagination. enjoy!
-
Hangzhou
The day started piss and ended vinegar, (which was a good thing). Angela and I got into a spat over the possibilities of working in China. I'm for, she's against. That put us both in a mood that continued in me. Next we were too late in packing to grab a bite to eat before leaving the hotel, and we were out of money. The 24 hour, all convenience Bank of China ATM's were out of service, for the second day in a row! and the hotel apparently only exchanges money from a Mastercard once. A cash only economy is a good thing, but come on! Rick graciously offered to cover until we could get some more, so we heading out into the hot humid air to meet our bus.
Our taxi driver was insane. He was pissed because the head bellhop is friends with a rival taxi driver, and skipped his friend over to get the fare for Pu Dong airport, an easy ride 40 KM east, with maximum fare potential. Our driver was stuck with us. 3 americans with large bags and one chinese woman to hear the vent. he took us to the bus terminal, narrowly meeting death numerous times for ourselves and passerby, and still managed to hock 3 balls of mucus out the window. i was in the front seat and had great difficulty deciding which danger to shy away from.
We make it into the bus terminal, successfully ignoring the legion of entrepreneurs demanding they drive us to hangzhou. 20 minutes to departure and we're hungry. rick is going lo-carb, so he has jerky. angela and i hit the concession stand. Hmmm, do we have the boiled hotdogs on a stick and throw up later, or the boiled bean curd and throw up on wednesday. Angela settles on some pistachios, and i spend more useless minutes trying o decide if the pretty pink packages contain meat or insect or both, and if meat, is it meat i'd want to consume?
7-up and pringles. breakfast of champions.
lucky us, we get front row on the bus and it's not that bad. pretty good actually. good a/c, quiet (everyone was watching the karaoke on the TV) and smooth comfy seats. I'm still brooding over the spat with angela, and that turns into a heated, hushed conversation that colors the first part of the trip. we finally make up, and by this time I'm exhausted, letting the jet lag in. I sleep intermittently, awakening to close my mouth and notice that the countryside outside of Shanghai looks like southeast texas.
we arrive in hangzhou, exist the bus, then walk to the opposite side of the tarmac to await Krista, as she tries to get us tickets to Wenzhou (our destination tomorrow). As is becoming the norm, we attract a crowd by our very anglo-prescence. I'm still sore inside, so i shoot dirty looks at every local in his 20's who decides to stand by my luggage, and i end up holding all of them in stacks. The tickets are no dice, wrong station for Wenzhou, so we exit into a parking lot that is part lot, part bazaar, part human stock exchange. people can't stop staring or demanding we sign up on thier all day Hangzhou tour. After waiting while krista negotiates with numerous would-be's (have i mentioned that krista is amazing?), we pick a guy and start following him and his umbrella towards his car. out the lot, across the sidewalk, across the freeway, weaving and stepping through 11 lanes of both-ways traffic. ("stop for the bus, the bus always wins"). We make it to the other side, and miraculously, so does our luggage. more hasty negotiation as the driver realizes stupid americans brought house in luggage, and it al cant fit in his trunk. Well, it can't with the trunk closed, but it will fit with the trunk wide open. Solution! Next! we pile in and drive off through blast zone hangzhou. During the course of our day, we will see 6 separate Hangzhous. The one containing bus station #1 looks like Saigon, circa Stanley Kubrick. There's rubble in the streets, buildings will be half collapsed, with fronts blown out and walls hanging in shards while the other half is open for business. Cars and mopeds play chicken with bikes and pedestrians. the air is oppressively hot, near 100 with 100% humidity and no breeze.
As we near our hotel, progress begins to rear. Entire buildings are now being reworked, their inner spines intact while workers scrape off the skin of an old building and begin to build anew. Hangzhou is apparently next on the next great leap forward, and everything older than 1972 (which is a lot) is falling under the pickaxe.
we arrive at the Jin Lin hotel and check in. it's not as fancy as the equatorial (gui du!)! but the price is right: 248 RMB or about 30 bucks a night, breakfast included. the room is somewhat clean, and the shower is futuristic, so we're happy. we throw down, clean up and regroup outside to head off to hangzhou's main attraction, the west lake. it's decided to get cash at the spot, as the bank around the corner did not accept mastercard.
we arrive at the lake and i hit a 24 hour atm. card declined. i hit the other machine, card declined. i try another card, declined. angry, (this better not be MBNA fucking with me!) we decide to hit the lake, and get money later. by now I'm jet lagged, angry, and slowly starving as my pringles and 7up is quickly being eaten away by the heat and humidity, which by now is visible by a foggy cloud laying over the entire lake. Houstonians willl know: if it's 100 degrees at noon and it's foggy, you're in trouble.
thankfully, here's where the fun began. we embarked on a bamboo boat, facing each other, two on each side, and the driver gets out a paddle and starts to row. this single large plank of wood will ferry us in our small craft out into the middle of the lake, where it is absolutely gorgeous. apparently those ink and silk paintings of chinese landscapes are not imagination. west lake has been a spot for generations, the imperials court once having resided in Hangzhou after the mongols kicked them outta bejing. we stopped at the island of the three moon pools: a man-made island in the middle of the lake that was constructed by 200,000 workers in 800 ad by order of the emperor. I say, they just don't make islands like this anymore. the walk around the thru takes 45 minutes and is filled with picturesque views, tranquil pools of coy and pagodas of peace. oh and cold tea, immediately cook coffee. on the return trip, we practice english with a teenage group from another boat. by this time I'm enjoying the breeze on the lake, the views of the antediluvian pagodas on the shore and the gentle lull of the rowing boat, but i'm not showing it as I'm totally without glucose in my overheated body.
we walk the streets looking for a atm to no avail, apparently we're in the third part of hangzhou, the art district as we pass the prestigious school of fine art (where krista studied) and numerous galleries. we find an ATM, but alast, ncad declined. starving, we ask for advice and are directed to a hotel restaurant where we are the 2nd table seated and the only foreigners. next to us is a big table of loud, boisterous men, and in the corner a mother with her child, watching chinese tv.
life is now great. a/c, food on the way, and Sijo beer, smoooth and icy. they bring big bottles and small cups, and smaller cups of good tea. hangzhou is famous for it's dragon well tea and it shows. the food arrives and it's simply marvelous. jelly fish salad, picked cabbage, stir fried chicken and vegetables, marinated lotus root, soup with baby lotus leaves, fresh tofu in spicy oil, whole shrimp-on-a-stick (heads will ROLL!) and my coup-de-grace, a sweet and sour fish, turned inside out, deboned and with head looking straight to god. devouring occurs to all.
sated, the owner of the hotel comes over to practice her english, and gives us her number and card, thanking us for coming to her hotel and offering to teach angela chinese! (krista surmises they mistake us for students from the international art school). we thank her, and make our way to the road, where we are almost run over by a marauding audi. from fame to splat, if you're not careful. we hail a taxi and ask him to take us to a bank of china, which i have used before to exchange money and i feel will be a good bet. we then drive through part 4 of hangzhou, 1950's land. small streets with shops and boutiques that smack of 50's communist architecture. even the women are wearing old-style sundresses. we pass a clothing store called "to live in the U.S.", we don't stop. By now, glucose is coursing thru my veins and I'm feeling a lot better. Until we get to the bank, in the middle of Hangzhou's 5th area, the commercial district (currently being rebuilt). the atm's are out of service (same message i got in shanghai), i go inside the bank, it's closing early. fun though how everyone looks shocked to see a daniel in shorts, walking quickly around the room looking for exchange. there's another bank around the corner, so we walk for 5 minutes, find another one, ATM is still offline!! My god! we go inside and take a number, and find another atm that seems to be working. it does, and we get out cash. valuable lesson: acquiring funds the american way doesn't always work in the 2nd world.
with that done, the two big pisses of the day have ended. we're tired, we decide to go back to the hotel to relax and regroup.
now the jin lin hotel offers their guests a variety of ways to relax. the 4th floor holds a huge restaurant, as well as private rooms containing majjohng machines and poker, open all nigh. in addition, a discount coupon for their inhouse foot massage services is offered. not being the gambling type angela and i go in search of the foot massage. and we can't find it. every room is either blocked or contains various people gambling. we go down stairs to get directions...ok we'll try again. we peek thru a window at a what looks like a massage-doctors office, in construction. a guy on a phone notices our coupons and waves us thru, as his assistant un-barricades the door. he leads us down a back stairwell into a hidden level where construction and painting is going on at a feverish pace. paint and drywall chips are everywhere. we are led to a room, where two teenagers are talking and smoking on comfortable chairs, they jump up at the sight of us, hastily put out the cigarette and start cleaning up the chairs. this must be the place. we sit down and are brought dragon well tea and nuts from a very nice teenager who giggles in that teen ohmigosh way every time we speak after a few minutes of waiting, a man and a woman enter the room with big buckets of tea we think, the feet go in and for next hour we're in heaven, foot and e.g. massage, they worked out every muscle and i didn't want to leave. when it was over, we walked back up the stairs and i got a peek outside the window at the courtyard of a high rise apartment, and was reminded of how close packed this country can be. after regrouping with rick, krista and some former students of krista's, we headed out o Hangzhou and found ourselves in number 6, the third street promenade, hangzhou style. great avenue walk street filled with shops of every description. the high light were the woodcarving stores, old antiques and the traditional herbal emporiums. those were cooool. drawers reaching to the sky filled with all matter of herbs and rhizomes. krista bought some herbs for her father, a mixture incased in round balls of white wax for freshness. i dug the tobacco store, and bought a neat looking pipe, some tobacco, and of course, a cuban cigar (I HOPE IT'S CUBAN. it says it's habana, but the price was much much lower than the others. monte cristo, so we'll see. we ended the night in a delightful restaurant second story overlooking the traditional architecture. the manager was pleased to have us there, and even went to another restaurant to get us dumplings (my fault, dumplings are breakfast food only. next i'll be ordering cappuccinos in rome at 5:30 pm.). they bent over backwards and made us wontons of good fortune (speciality of the house ( THE tea was great too.)
oh and the vinegar? served with the dumplings of course. what's soy sauce?
My webserver is STILL down, so I have no way of posting pictures. Which sucks because Hangzou is beautiful. I promise to repost this once everything works again. In the meantime, here's the text dump. Not as pretty, but put the xbox down and use yer imagination. enjoy!
-
Hangzhou
The day started piss and ended vinegar, (which was a good thing). Angela and I got into a spat over the possibilities of working in China. I'm for, she's against. That put us both in a mood that continued in me. Next we were too late in packing to grab a bite to eat before leaving the hotel, and we were out of money. The 24 hour, all convenience Bank of China ATM's were out of service, for the second day in a row! and the hotel apparently only exchanges money from a Mastercard once. A cash only economy is a good thing, but come on! Rick graciously offered to cover until we could get some more, so we heading out into the hot humid air to meet our bus.
Our taxi driver was insane. He was pissed because the head bellhop is friends with a rival taxi driver, and skipped his friend over to get the fare for Pu Dong airport, an easy ride 40 KM east, with maximum fare potential. Our driver was stuck with us. 3 americans with large bags and one chinese woman to hear the vent. he took us to the bus terminal, narrowly meeting death numerous times for ourselves and passerby, and still managed to hock 3 balls of mucus out the window. i was in the front seat and had great difficulty deciding which danger to shy away from.
We make it into the bus terminal, successfully ignoring the legion of entrepreneurs demanding they drive us to hangzhou. 20 minutes to departure and we're hungry. rick is going lo-carb, so he has jerky. angela and i hit the concession stand. Hmmm, do we have the boiled hotdogs on a stick and throw up later, or the boiled bean curd and throw up on wednesday. Angela settles on some pistachios, and i spend more useless minutes trying o decide if the pretty pink packages contain meat or insect or both, and if meat, is it meat i'd want to consume?
7-up and pringles. breakfast of champions.
lucky us, we get front row on the bus and it's not that bad. pretty good actually. good a/c, quiet (everyone was watching the karaoke on the TV) and smooth comfy seats. I'm still brooding over the spat with angela, and that turns into a heated, hushed conversation that colors the first part of the trip. we finally make up, and by this time I'm exhausted, letting the jet lag in. I sleep intermittently, awakening to close my mouth and notice that the countryside outside of Shanghai looks like southeast texas.
we arrive in hangzhou, exist the bus, then walk to the opposite side of the tarmac to await Krista, as she tries to get us tickets to Wenzhou (our destination tomorrow). As is becoming the norm, we attract a crowd by our very anglo-prescence. I'm still sore inside, so i shoot dirty looks at every local in his 20's who decides to stand by my luggage, and i end up holding all of them in stacks. The tickets are no dice, wrong station for Wenzhou, so we exit into a parking lot that is part lot, part bazaar, part human stock exchange. people can't stop staring or demanding we sign up on thier all day Hangzhou tour. After waiting while krista negotiates with numerous would-be's (have i mentioned that krista is amazing?), we pick a guy and start following him and his umbrella towards his car. out the lot, across the sidewalk, across the freeway, weaving and stepping through 11 lanes of both-ways traffic. ("stop for the bus, the bus always wins"). We make it to the other side, and miraculously, so does our luggage. more hasty negotiation as the driver realizes stupid americans brought house in luggage, and it al cant fit in his trunk. Well, it can't with the trunk closed, but it will fit with the trunk wide open. Solution! Next! we pile in and drive off through blast zone hangzhou. During the course of our day, we will see 6 separate Hangzhous. The one containing bus station #1 looks like Saigon, circa Stanley Kubrick. There's rubble in the streets, buildings will be half collapsed, with fronts blown out and walls hanging in shards while the other half is open for business. Cars and mopeds play chicken with bikes and pedestrians. the air is oppressively hot, near 100 with 100% humidity and no breeze.
As we near our hotel, progress begins to rear. Entire buildings are now being reworked, their inner spines intact while workers scrape off the skin of an old building and begin to build anew. Hangzhou is apparently next on the next great leap forward, and everything older than 1972 (which is a lot) is falling under the pickaxe.
we arrive at the Jin Lin hotel and check in. it's not as fancy as the equatorial (gui du!)! but the price is right: 248 RMB or about 30 bucks a night, breakfast included. the room is somewhat clean, and the shower is futuristic, so we're happy. we throw down, clean up and regroup outside to head off to hangzhou's main attraction, the west lake. it's decided to get cash at the spot, as the bank around the corner did not accept mastercard.
we arrive at the lake and i hit a 24 hour atm. card declined. i hit the other machine, card declined. i try another card, declined. angry, (this better not be MBNA fucking with me!) we decide to hit the lake, and get money later. by now I'm jet lagged, angry, and slowly starving as my pringles and 7up is quickly being eaten away by the heat and humidity, which by now is visible by a foggy cloud laying over the entire lake. Houstonians willl know: if it's 100 degrees at noon and it's foggy, you're in trouble.
thankfully, here's where the fun began. we embarked on a bamboo boat, facing each other, two on each side, and the driver gets out a paddle and starts to row. this single large plank of wood will ferry us in our small craft out into the middle of the lake, where it is absolutely gorgeous. apparently those ink and silk paintings of chinese landscapes are not imagination. west lake has been a spot for generations, the imperials court once having resided in Hangzhou after the mongols kicked them outta bejing. we stopped at the island of the three moon pools: a man-made island in the middle of the lake that was constructed by 200,000 workers in 800 ad by order of the emperor. I say, they just don't make islands like this anymore. the walk around the thru takes 45 minutes and is filled with picturesque views, tranquil pools of coy and pagodas of peace. oh and cold tea, immediately cook coffee. on the return trip, we practice english with a teenage group from another boat. by this time I'm enjoying the breeze on the lake, the views of the antediluvian pagodas on the shore and the gentle lull of the rowing boat, but i'm not showing it as I'm totally without glucose in my overheated body.
we walk the streets looking for a atm to no avail, apparently we're in the third part of hangzhou, the art district as we pass the prestigious school of fine art (where krista studied) and numerous galleries. we find an ATM, but alast, ncad declined. starving, we ask for advice and are directed to a hotel restaurant where we are the 2nd table seated and the only foreigners. next to us is a big table of loud, boisterous men, and in the corner a mother with her child, watching chinese tv.
life is now great. a/c, food on the way, and Sijo beer, smoooth and icy. they bring big bottles and small cups, and smaller cups of good tea. hangzhou is famous for it's dragon well tea and it shows. the food arrives and it's simply marvelous. jelly fish salad, picked cabbage, stir fried chicken and vegetables, marinated lotus root, soup with baby lotus leaves, fresh tofu in spicy oil, whole shrimp-on-a-stick (heads will ROLL!) and my coup-de-grace, a sweet and sour fish, turned inside out, deboned and with head looking straight to god. devouring occurs to all.
sated, the owner of the hotel comes over to practice her english, and gives us her number and card, thanking us for coming to her hotel and offering to teach angela chinese! (krista surmises they mistake us for students from the international art school). we thank her, and make our way to the road, where we are almost run over by a marauding audi. from fame to splat, if you're not careful. we hail a taxi and ask him to take us to a bank of china, which i have used before to exchange money and i feel will be a good bet. we then drive through part 4 of hangzhou, 1950's land. small streets with shops and boutiques that smack of 50's communist architecture. even the women are wearing old-style sundresses. we pass a clothing store called "to live in the U.S.", we don't stop. By now, glucose is coursing thru my veins and I'm feeling a lot better. Until we get to the bank, in the middle of Hangzhou's 5th area, the commercial district (currently being rebuilt). the atm's are out of service (same message i got in shanghai), i go inside the bank, it's closing early. fun though how everyone looks shocked to see a daniel in shorts, walking quickly around the room looking for exchange. there's another bank around the corner, so we walk for 5 minutes, find another one, ATM is still offline!! My god! we go inside and take a number, and find another atm that seems to be working. it does, and we get out cash. valuable lesson: acquiring funds the american way doesn't always work in the 2nd world.
with that done, the two big pisses of the day have ended. we're tired, we decide to go back to the hotel to relax and regroup.
now the jin lin hotel offers their guests a variety of ways to relax. the 4th floor holds a huge restaurant, as well as private rooms containing majjohng machines and poker, open all nigh. in addition, a discount coupon for their inhouse foot massage services is offered. not being the gambling type angela and i go in search of the foot massage. and we can't find it. every room is either blocked or contains various people gambling. we go down stairs to get directions...ok we'll try again. we peek thru a window at a what looks like a massage-doctors office, in construction. a guy on a phone notices our coupons and waves us thru, as his assistant un-barricades the door. he leads us down a back stairwell into a hidden level where construction and painting is going on at a feverish pace. paint and drywall chips are everywhere. we are led to a room, where two teenagers are talking and smoking on comfortable chairs, they jump up at the sight of us, hastily put out the cigarette and start cleaning up the chairs. this must be the place. we sit down and are brought dragon well tea and nuts from a very nice teenager who giggles in that teen ohmigosh way every time we speak after a few minutes of waiting, a man and a woman enter the room with big buckets of tea we think, the feet go in and for next hour we're in heaven, foot and e.g. massage, they worked out every muscle and i didn't want to leave. when it was over, we walked back up the stairs and i got a peek outside the window at the courtyard of a high rise apartment, and was reminded of how close packed this country can be. after regrouping with rick, krista and some former students of krista's, we headed out o Hangzhou and found ourselves in number 6, the third street promenade, hangzhou style. great avenue walk street filled with shops of every description. the high light were the woodcarving stores, old antiques and the traditional herbal emporiums. those were cooool. drawers reaching to the sky filled with all matter of herbs and rhizomes. krista bought some herbs for her father, a mixture incased in round balls of white wax for freshness. i dug the tobacco store, and bought a neat looking pipe, some tobacco, and of course, a cuban cigar (I HOPE IT'S CUBAN. it says it's habana, but the price was much much lower than the others. monte cristo, so we'll see. we ended the night in a delightful restaurant second story overlooking the traditional architecture. the manager was pleased to have us there, and even went to another restaurant to get us dumplings (my fault, dumplings are breakfast food only. next i'll be ordering cappuccinos in rome at 5:30 pm.). they bent over backwards and made us wontons of good fortune (speciality of the house ( THE tea was great too.)
oh and the vinegar? served with the dumplings of course. what's soy sauce?
posted by DLoyd76 at 10/08/2004 03:08:00 PM
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