Hanging in Hangzhou

 

“I’ll be baack!” (Insert heavy German accent)  With those immortal words echoing in our ears, we boarded China Eastern flight # 1345 for Shanghai. We have left China for the last time, two times previously. But like Arnold, we keep coming back.  It just keeps getting easier each time and so changing our minds is easier. Five years ago, the visa process involved a fist full of documents and at least three or four hours of our time.  That is if you filled out the documents correctly. This time it took 5 minutes to drop off a lot less paperwork and 3 minutes to pick it up our passports a week later.

 

We flew to Shanghai because of a promise we made to friends our last “last time”, that we would visit them if/when we returned to China. They live in Hangzhou, about a one hour, high speed train ride from Shanghai or as we traveled, a three hour bus ride.  

 

 

 

 

 

We over-nighted in Shanghai to give us a leg up on the jet lag that we knew we would be suffering and left the next morning for Hangzhou.

 

 

Hangzhou’s climate is described as “humid subtropical”. It lived up to its billing with temperatures well into the 30’s and the humidex off the chart. Just raising my arm to wipe the sweat off my brow caused me to breakout in a sweat. It reinforced our decision to avoid living in a tropical climate.  On the upside, our skin had never been so soft; actually mushy might be a better description.

Hangzhou has to be in our top three most beautiful cities in China, perhaps number one. So nice in fact, for a millisecond, we even considered living and teaching here. Perhaps it was the affects of dehydration or the closeness to our friends. What impressed us the most was the strict adherence to traffic laws that all drivers follow in Hangzhou. 

 

 

Traffic actually stops when you are standing at a crosswalk. They obey traffic signals as well, unlike Harbin where red means “slow down”, yellow means “speed up” green means “go like a bat out of hell” and pedestrians are just moving speed bumps.

 

Hangzhou sits on the Yellow River delta so water, water, everywhere and West Lake is its most famous feature.

 

 

 

 

Thanks to dredging that has been going on for centuries, the lake has an average depth of about 3 metres and comes with three man made islands and a causeway formed with the dredged material.

 

 

 

 

Providing a nice view point for Hangzhou and the surrounding mountains is a brand spanking new Leifeng Pagoda which finished construction in 2002 and replaces the original one which had collapsed about 80 years previously.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most of the area around West Lake is maintained as parkland along with a well placed Starbucks to ice the cake. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The park is home to the Lingyin Temple, a very large and very rich Buddhist monastery. We caught a glimpse of the monastery from the Leifeng Pagoda but did not have the time to explore it and the surrounding park.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But what I have read about it warrants a return visit to Hangzhou. We will be returning to Shanghai in the spring of 2015 on a cruise ship from Vancouver as part of our goal to have circumnavigated the globe by land and sea.  It is one of the last pieces of our global land and sea journey.

 

 

 

We were treated like royalty during our stay in Hangzhou and it was with sadness that we had to leave after only a few days.  We have to start teaching a week earlier than in previous years. An indication perhaps that “something was rotten in the state of Denmark” or HIT.