We”ve been very busy for the last two weeks and consequently it’’s been hard to update this site with any meaningful content. However, it’’s Sunday morning and I”ve got a few hours to spare so I”ll try my best to summarize what we”ve been up to. Ok, here goes.

Hangzhou
Last Saturday (05/11/12) Yuki and I made a day trip down to Hangzhou, the ancient capital of China. Located on the low reaches of Qiantang River, Hangzhou is, as any Chinese person will tell you, one of the most beautiful cities the country has to offer.

We arrived in Hangzhou at about 10:30am and, as you can”t buy return tickets in China, we quickly made our way to the station’’s ticket office to secure our seats for the journey home. The queues were typically long, the room was typically stuffy and, as ever, queue jumping was typically rampant. After an exciting 60-minutes of shuffling we did however eventually manage to purchase our outbound tickets - no thanks to the lady that served us - and we quickly made our escape into the city.

Tourism in Hangzhou is mostly focused around West Lake (Xi Hu), a vast natural expanse of water surrounded by temples, mountains and gardens. The area can apparently be divided up into ”10 scenes” but given that we had limited time (and that we thought the whole 10 scenes thing sounded somewhat pretentious) we decided we would just casually amble around a few key spots.

The lake itself was fairly impressive despite the gloomy weather and you can easily waste a few hours just walking along its banks - Yuki would disagree but this is my opinion, not hers. However, once we got bored of dry land we headed for one of the various tourist boats that took us (and another 30 people) across to the various islands that are dotted around the lake. Although we were a bit disappointed that the islands were all very similar (Chinese style can seem a bit homogenous after a while), we still enjoyed our boating experience.

After our island hopping antics we took a walk along the Bai Causeway. This man-made stretch of land was the brainchild of Governer Bai Juyi (772-846), built to help facilitate travel across the lake. Without a doubt this was the most beautiful area of the lake and where Yuki and I witnessed the most spectacular sunset I have ever seen (It’’s currently forming the header of this page if you want to have a look). Shortly after we headed back into town towards Wushan Square.

We had actually only gone to Wushan square to find a Caribbean Barbeque that we had read about but, in process, found an amazing temple sitting high-up on a mountain illuminated against the night sky with thousands of carefully placed lights. This thing didn”t look real it was so magnificent. Anyway, that was pretty much the end of our day. We found the BBQ place, ate as much as we could and headed back to the station. See below for pictures:

Pictures: West Lake

Suzhou School Trip
The kids at our school have just had their mid-term exams and, to cheer them up, the school organised a day trip (12/11/05) to one of China’’s only theme parks, Amusement World. Being responsible and dedicated teachers Yuki and I decided it was our duty to tag along and look after the kids. For extra support we also dragged along Zoe, another English teacher from a different school in Jiaxing.

The theme park was fairly small compared with the ones you find in America and obviously didn”t boast the same range of rides you can expect to find in places such as Universal Studios. To be honest though, I don”t think any one goes to China to ride roller coasters and it’’s not really considered a tourist destination. However, despite it’’s small scale it was still a good laugh and we got to experience some great, although questionably safe, rides.

The best one by far was this crazy contraption that I can only describe as a rotating loop the loop. You sit in these small padded carriages (that were clearly not designed for big westerners) that move along this small segment of track that forms one never-ending loop. These cars don”t move fast so when you are upside-down you really do feel upside down. The best bit however is that the whole loop spins, throwing the cars occupants around like they are in a giant tumble drier. Before I went on it I was wondering why I had never seen this ride in the west. Afterwards I realised it was because no theme park could possibly afford the insurance they would need to legally allow people to go on it.

I won”t bother going into much more detail because at the end of the day the park was just a collection of mediocre rides in a fairly scenic location. We went because the school paid for us but it’’s not really worth the trip if you”re just a tourist passing though. We had a good time though and the kids loved it.

Categories: China
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