Paradise City

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Geo: 30.25, 120.17

By the time we finished breakfast, our bags were loaded on the bus and we were off to see one of the two Chinese "Paradise Cities". The Crowne Plaza was on a lake in a remote area outside of the city. It was a beautiful, modern hotel with great lake views, but since we got in so late, we could only enjoy the location at breakfast.

Hangzhou is the greenest city we have seen. Wide boulevards with lots of green space and small parks. Like most of the large cities, they have a metro system and almost all the stops have a free bicycle exchange system that is very well used. China recognizes that it has a serous air pollution problem and these bike exchanges are just one way to combat it. Other means are to restrict traffic. For example, in Beijing, each weekday the cars with license plates ending in a specific two digit combination are allowed to drive, ie, Monday it was 1+7 and Tuesday 3+6, etc. Here in Hangzhou, you are only able to drive to the West Lake area on Saturdays if your license plate is an even number and Sundays if it is odd. We actually saw cars being pulled over getting tickets plus points taken away (12 points your done)!

It took about 45 minutes to drive to West Lake Park, actually five parks surrounding the lake. This is a beautiful wooded area with high hills surounding the lake. With all the vegetation in Hangzhou and, in particular at West Lake, this was one of our least polluted days.

After strolling through the park, we all boarded a boat and took about a 45-minute cruise around the lake. The lake was beautiful from the shoreline and edged toward spectacular from the boat, with several temples and pagodas in the hillsides and colorful boats on the water.

From West Lake we took a short bus ride to the Dragon Well Tea Plantation. The rolling hillsides are covered with tea plants, trimmed to about 3 feet in height in neat rows. The rows are spaced just wide enough to walk. Brennan found a bamboo stick that they told him he could keep. He carried it with him the rest of the trip.

We had a lesson on growing, harvesting and brewing green tea as well as the medicinal values of the tea. The tea leaves are all picked by hand in the spirng, summer and fall. The spring harvest is the best quality and is called the "Emperor's tea". Without getting into detail, we have been brewing our tea all wrong! From the medicinal side, if we were to drink green tea daily, we would have a long, healthy, stress free, peaceful life! Yes, we bought some Emperor's Tea!

Following the regular family style/lazy susan lunch served in some hotel, we headed to a really fun pedestrian market area. Since it was Saturday, it was packed. In the center of the market was a traditional Chinese pharmacy. We all went into this huge (many rooms) pharmacy where pharmacy assistants were filling prescriptions. These prescriptions could contain up to 20 ingredients of herbs, plants, flowers, animal and insect parts, even bird spit; all boiled and brewed into a liquid for two to three hours. It was a fascinating place and was packed with hundreds of prescriptions being filled in the short time we were there. We all sampled a liquid that was good for your liver.

The market was comprised of dozens of streets with an untold number of shops where anything and everything could be bought. A section of the market was selling stinky tofu and we could not get through it quickly enough. Several of the shops had men with huge mallets pounding peanuts while yelling and singing. We tried some of their candy samples and bought a container of peanut brittle-type candy which was really tasty. We also saw a talented glass blower and several people eating fried octopus on a stick. Brennan's highlight was playing "snap and catch" in the street. It is a type of soft mitt that snaps out a ball that another player catches in his mitt at the same time his ball is snapped to you. Brennan did very well and there were lots of players once Brennan started playing. We should have bought it for 98 yuan, but did not.

After spending a couple of hours in the market, we boarded the bus for a 3-hour ride to Suzhou. We arrived at the Pan Pacific Hotel after dark. We had our 10-course lazy susan dinner across the street from the hotel. This was our first meal that was polluted with cigarette smoke. Our pre-trip research said there were lots of smokers, but we were pleasantly surprised that this was the first time we were really affected. In talking to others in our group, we were told that the local bars are smoke filled. If the pollution does not kill the natives, the second-hand smoke will! So far on the trip, we have also had active smokers on elevators a few times.

The Pan Pacific is a beautiful hotel with traditional Chinese pagoda-style roofs, ponds filled with koi fish, and spectacular gardens. Brennan swam in the rock waterfall pool -- too cold for the adults to get in more than waist deep. The one knock we have of the place is that it is truly a maze. It took us 20 minutes to find our room because to get to the Lobby, you have to take an elevator to the 3rd floor and then to our room a different elevator back down to the 1st floor, very confusing the first time.

The end of another event-filled day!

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