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Published: February 18th 2010
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Snow!
Hangzhou Xin nian kuai le! (Happy New Year!) It’s now the year of the Tiger here and the past week has been a mass of fireworks/firecrackers and hunting for open shops. They take new year far more seriously than what we do, where we get one day off work they get a whole week! On the official new years eve (last Saturday) I went wondering the streets with some of the other teachers. We found people setting off fireworks/crackers at the side of the street, on pavements, in the middle of the road, on bridges and from balconies. Walking became a bit of a ‘dodge the firework’ exercise! We ended up at a bakery where we made friends with the staff who gave us sparklers, lit some fireworks for us and it started snowing- all in all a great way to see in the new year (again!).
As we all had a week off a few of us teachers decided to take a trip out of Hangzhou and see some more of China. We ended up in a city called Nanjing about 120 miles north via a 6 hour train journey. Years ago unemployment was high so the government decided that
people should build railway tracks, as a result this area of the country has hundreds of miles of track which randomly connect to each other and which means that even the simplest journey is not direct and therefore takes hours. Nanjing was once the capital of China. The new years celebrations here were huge. The city is built around the Yangtze River and its tributaries, all these areas were lit up and there was a huge food/souvenir market in the centre (right outside where our hostel was!). We arrived about 4pm, got lost for a couple of hours and eventually found our way to the hostel and the bar where we busied ourselves making friends with other teachers and getting acquainted with the local beer.
The following day we decided to visit a museum on the Japanese massacre in the city. In the 1930s the Japanese took control of Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing. In Nanjing they killed 300,000 people and destroyed over ¾ of the city in 7 days. The museum was a really interesting and emotional place, it had a ‘grave of 10,000 people’ where archaeologists had unearthed skeletons many of children with bullet holes in their heads.
After this we took a bus (well several, we got confused with the Chinese characters and got very lost!) to the mountains where there is a mausoleum of the founder of modern China. It was a really impressive structure and well worth the 80 step climb. We also went to another tower/temple which gave us great views over the city. On the way back to the hostel we decided to stop off at a forbidden city but were disappointed to find it was actually now a park with some stones! We decided to travel back to Hangzhou overnight (leaving at 1am) thus saving on accommodation (only £5 a night but still…!). So we went out to dinner with our new found teacher friend, went to he train station to find we had to fight for our seats on a packed train. There were people standing, sitting on each other, hanging out of windows- it really was like you see in the films. Luckily we had seating tickets so kicked the people out of our seats and got some good kip.
Hangzhou is as lovely as ever. The weather seems to have improved recently and today was quite warm and
sunny. I took my little purple bike on a long ride, without a map, and luckily ended up at the lake. It was absolutely beautiful, so many small wooden boats floating around and the mountains looked spectacular. I sat on a bench and had some girls come up and ask to take a photo with me, followed by a family who sat their baby next to me and told the kid to call me Auntie. A little strange! I can now eat most things with chopsticks, I had to learn pretty quick as cutlery is hard to come by here! Tomorrow I’m back to school and lesson planning. This weekend I have to teach about 15 hours of classes on my own which is a little daunting but I’m excited to finally be starting proper work again!
Anyway that’s enough waffle from me! I’ll update again soon!
xxx
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linda.finley-day
non-member comment
Ummm chopsticks are a bit tricky . . . but fun! Sounds like you're having plenty of that! Much love, Lindaxx