The Physicists and me go to Hangzhou

I've been trying to take advantage of being in a foreign country as much as possible so even though it was a really busy weekend we arranged a day trip to Hangzhou. We went on a Saturday in between a work dinner Friday night and a work picnic for the students on Sunday.

We went with Joe, two other post docs - Aquib and Meng Quan, and Aquib's wife Hiraa.












Hangzhou basically has a big lake with a bunch of little islands that you can walk around and take boats to. Mainly you just go for the scenery, which was pretty but there happened to be very bad visibility on the day we went, as you can tell from some of our pictures.








































We wandered around the islands for a while. We tried to get one of these rowboats but these guys wouldn't take us. We think they get paid by the hour and prefer not to get customers. Eventually, we found the big boats which took us across.











The random things we saw while wandering were:

1. Retired guys playing music in the park and painting Chinese calligraphy on the pavement with water. (Danny says that's the life... I'm scared for our future)















2. More of the candied fruits I tried in Souzhou which had gone bad in the middle last time but we tried them again anyway. They looked pretty but were bad in the middle again.














3. Black corn, which I had never seen before. Danny warned me it isn't very good but I decided to try it. I ended up only having a bite because it is terrible. It tastes just like regular corn except less sweet and a much worse consistency. Aquib and Hiraa who also never tried it before had a little before we gave up and threw it out. Danny was sad nobody listened about how bad the corn is, also he ate half of it because he felt bad wasting food. I think in the states we never tried it because they only sell sweet corn and use this strand for cow feed.











4. A giant teapot which serves free tea.














5. This guy stirring tea leaves by hand to dry them. It takes about five hours a batch and the store sells them for $5 to $100 an ounce... labor is cheap here and machines aren't.











6. More of these lion sculptures, they put them on either side of doors all over China to protect the building... I feel safer now.











7. Some rowboats which we rented to paddle around for a while. We crashed into several boats as we went but Danny insisted he knew what he was doing and I didn't.












8. This little building structure shaped like a swastika - the traditional Buddhist symbol meaning peace, not the Nazi symbol. I didn't know about the Buddhist swastika symbol until college when I found out that in Asia people have a very different association with that image. My head still leaps to the way the Nazis bastardized the symbol anytime I look at it though.












9. Part of the pavement was made out of somebody's old gravestone. It is hard to tell from the picture but Danny, Joe and Meng Quan said the writing carved into it says so. Seems pretty disrespectful to turn a gravestone into the sidewalk if you ask me.











10. Meng Quan tried to catch a fish with his bare hands.














11. We saw the location that is on the back of one of the Chinese bills.












We got hot pot for lunch. I was super happy that Hiraa and Aquib had some diet restrictions and shared a veggie pot with me. The main reason I have trouble finding food here is food is often family style where everyone shares a plate and when I go out in a big group everyone wants meat. We sat at two tables so Danny, Joe and Meng Quan could have a separate pot with meat but the food was great. Hiraa and Aquib had never tried hot pot and I think they really liked it. We took them to the Japanese style hot pot place near our apartment two weeks after this (I'm posting this way after the fact) which I think is a lot better because it has individual pots.










After lunch we went to this pagoda and looked around. It was sort of pretty and I liked the view but it had been destroyed and rebuilt and looked pretty unauthentic. On the bottom floor you could see the remnants of the old building though, that was kind of cool. On the walls of the pagoda they had base reliefs with the story of the sorcerer and white snake. I don't really understand the story but apparently a movie just came out about it here and we keep saying we are going to watch it.
























The cab ride back to the train station was a really frightening experience. We took one of those unmarked private cabs, which I wasn't thrilled about but there were six of us so I figured it was safe. We caught the cab on a one way street. The driver said the fastest way to get there was to turn back, otherwise we would have to go 3 kilometers out of our way. So he made a U-turn. All we saw were headlights of cars swerving to avoid us as they honked angrily. Fortunately, we made it to the train station ok.

Then we got to wait around the train station with these guys and their rice bags...











I was pretty bummed out I had to work the next day but it was actually pretty fun. We had a school picnic at Min Hang Park. All the kids' parents brought food we could munch on and there was a giant slide that went all the way across the park. My favorite part was when one of their parents rented this group bike thing and I rode around the park in it with some of the girls from my class. Annie steered it and I have to admit it was a bit scary at times but it was really fun and quite a workout because we squeezed way too many kids in there and only four of us were peddling.