Blogs from Hangzhou , China, Asia - page 24

After being in Shanghai for about two days, I head to my destination for at least the next year, Hangzhou. Although I had been in China for the past two summers, I have actually never been to Hangzhou. Hangzhou is located southwest of Shanghai by about an 80 minute train ride (if you catch the speed train). The city is best known for its lake called Xihu (or West Lake because the city was originally built to the east of the lake. Now the city surrounds the lake). The Chinese have taken great pride in Xihu and it has become somewhat of a mythical lake with many folklores revolving around it. So expecting nothing and everything, I made my way on to the train to Hangzhou. When I disembark from the train with all my bags, ... read more

This is a blog to update my friends and family about my year in China. A little background about myself to readers who just happen to find this blog. I am from America (San Francisco specifically) and just graduated law school. I was lucky enough to have an opportunity to take a year off before starting my job so I decided to go to Hangzhou, China to study chinese for a year. Although I have spent the last two summers in China (Shanghai and Hong Kong), my mandarin skills are next to nothing. So I am starting from scratch and hoping to have a great year of adventure in Hangzhou.... read more

West Lake is the best lake... Then we took a little excursion out to the canal town of Wuzhen - a hamlet along the Grand Canal that was very prosperous during the Ming and Qing dynasties and is now sort of romantically decrepit. 2 parts of the town underwent a serious preservation effort a few years ago and they now charge tourists 100RMB per person, per part-of-town to go see it. But we thought it would be more interesting to see the un-preserved parts of town, where nice families charge you 1RMB per person to go into their beautiful old houses. Our guide knew all the great glamour shot opportunities too...... read more

Happy Birthday Megan Well on July 17th Megan turned the grand old age of 12. We tease her by saying that she is definitely a member of the "pre-teen" club which she thinks is really cool. I think most of the time she actually thinks she is already in her teens!!!!! The weather was ridiculously hot, so Megan didn't want to go out to do much during the day. We had some things planned for the following week so she was quite happy to chill out at home with us. Kevin came home from work at lunchtime so we waited until he got home to open gifts. Megan was so excited to have some small gifts to open. She had thought that she would have wait until we got back to the US to get anything, ... read more

Never before have I relied so heavily on sign language as the day I had to get myself between two Chinese cities by bus and train without knowing a word of Mandarin. Actually that's a lie, I know how to say "who farted?" in Chinese thanks to Carl Barron. For those interested, it's "Fom paaaah?". That said, at no point today did I need to interrogate anybody for alleged crimes of flatulence. We landed in China at about 1pm today on our awesomely cheap budget airline flight. Kate and I saved ourselves about $400 each by choosing to fly not into our destination of Shanghai but a neighbouring town about 200km south west of it called Hangzhou. From what we saw of Hangzhou from the aeroplane and footpaths, it looks beautiful and spacious. It's actually quite ... read more