Hangzhou — Day 1

Well, Hello! It’s been a while! The blog is still woefully behind. It’s the theme of my life, it seems. So, we’ll just keep plugging away, and maybe someday we’ll catch up again. For now, we have got to get out of China!

We said farewell to Beijing and hopped on a plane to Hangzhou, the city where my sister and her boyfriend, Lars, spent a semester through their college study abroad program. It’s still astonishing to me that both my brother and sister were living in China at the same time! And we are so thankful we got such an amazing opportunity to travel there!

We arrived at the Hangzhou airport, and Ben really did need to “caution head” so he didn’t hit it on the low ceiling!

We checked into our hotel, a Best Western. We had some time to kill before Jamie got out of class, so Craig asked at the hotel desk for a restaurant recommendation. We headed to “Grandma’s” just a few blocks away. It was cute, cheap and good! (I was tempted to steal some of their pillows. tee hee!)

The entire meal cost the equivalent of about $11 U.S. dollars and fed all of us. We tried lotus root (the white in the middle), a pork dish (the one Ben has his chopsticks in), green beans, potato smiles and xue bi (Sprite, pronounced “shway bee”.)

I thought these potato smiles were so cute, and then, when we got home, Andrew told me he’s had them at school. I guess I need to get out more.

After lunch, we got a chuckle out of the street cleaning vehicle pictured (poorly) below. If you look carefully, you can see that it is shooting water in two directions. We were glad it started spraying the water just after passing us, or we may have gotten a little wet! Hopefully, the cars in the other lane didn’t mind the bath.

Hangzhou is further south than Dalian and Beijing, so the climate is warmer, and there were bikes everywhere. Many had little electric motors on them so they were motor bikes, I guess.

Got water?

We took a cab to Jamie’s school and were happy to find her! Here she is in front of her dormitory that housed international students. She sporting her knock-off Abercrombie  sweater (the tag said it was authentic, but it had  the brand name spelled incorrectly) and her snazzy tea bottle.

She showed us her electric meter. She was allotted a certain amount and had to pay extra for more.

Her room was cozy, and she had her own bathroom.

We looked around campus a bit and noticed a few bikes.

We thought this sign was funny because it looks like “no trumpets.” We assume it means no honking, but we couldn’t tell since several people honked horns as they drove by the sign.

When Lars was out of class, we took a bus adventure to find a shopping district. Jamie and Lars did pretty good getting us there, considering there was no English spoken on the bus or printed on any of the signs. We, of course, had to take a picture of a car accident we saw while walking from the bus stop. We laughed at the fact that we had not seen more accidents!

We also laughed when we saw a Porsche parked in front of a KFC restaurant.

We arrived at the shopping street and bought a few trinkets.

There was not a lot of bargaining to be found in this area, but the prices were all pretty decent.

Michael Jackson (top left) and Kobe Bryant (right) are quite popular. We also saw many guys like the one pictured under Michael. They have better hair than me.

The guy below was making things out of glass. He was very talented, and his art was very cheap considering how much time he put into each piece.

It turns out Jamie wanted to take us to a place for supper called “Grandma’s!” We found out it was a chain restaurant and got to eat at a different location.

Some of our meal included an egg & tomato dish, potato smiles, looks like some more pork, green tea cakes and fish.

After supper, we ended our night with a little tour of Trustmart, which was basically Walmart. It had some Walmart signage, even.

Lars showed us his favorite book. The title kind of gave us the creeps.

Maybe the use of the word “lurk” should be edited. We laughed quite a bit, maybe even shed some tears, over some funny English translated shirts that were for sale. Jamie’s shirt says, “One, Eight, Four, Seven, Three. Do you like the numbers game?”

The one below kind of leaves you hanging. And, yes, that is really all it says. No continuation to the back or anything.

The toy aisles looked familiar. The prices of the real Barbies compared to U.S. prices, so they would be very expensive to the average Chinese person.

And then it was on to the grocery section. A bunch of eggs. Not sure what kind of eggs.

Goose feet anyone?

Some of these turtles were moving.

A large vat of fish.

We did find a familiar product, and we bought some for dessert. And breakfast.