Travel : Shanghai - Hangzhou

Day 2 : August 28, 2011

Shanghai - Hangzhou

From Pudong Airport we went directly to Hangzhou.  It took about 3 hours by bus.  After 2 hours, we stopped at rest area or service area to buy some drinks or snacks.

Our Local Tour Guide, Mr. Ho, is from Hangzhou, lives in Hangzhou and he's very proud of it. Certainly he lives in the right city ... remember "zhu zai Hangzhou".  He was once a teacher.  After he retired, he is now an inbound tour guide.  Now you can guess how old he is.  And you can imagine how he explained all the things during our trip.  Yup, very informative and friendly.

Hangzhou is the capital city of Zhejiang Province, and located at the delta of Yangtze River. Its old name is Wuxi.  The city is not crowded with the population of 7 million. People are more relax and really enjoy their lives here.



Below are the photos of Hangzhou business area.

Why do people visit Hangzhou ?

1. Scenery
Hangzhou is a green city with beautiful sceneries and so called Heaven on Earth.  Hangzhou has a natural lake, called West Lake that we would visit tomorrow. You can see many trees and flowers along the road, parks, and gardens.

Plane Tree

 Weeping Willow

2. Arts and Legends
Hangzhou is famous for its legends, such as White Snake Legend (Bai Su Chen), Sampek Engtay, Chi Kung (Drunken Master) etc.  There are 2 famous performances in Hangzhou i.e. The Romance of  The Song Dinasty and The Impression of West Lake, that we would enjoy later.

3. History
Hangzhou is also one of the 6 ancient cities in China.
The 6 cities are Beijing, Xian, Chong Qing, Lao Yang, Kai Feng, and Hangzhou.  The most famous person in Hangzhou is General Yue Fei, and he became the legend.  Later I will tell you the story of cakwee (chinese fried bread) that is related to General Yue Fei.

4. Tea and Herbal Cuisine
Long Jing Green Tea is very famous.  Hangzhou Herbal Cuisine are various, one of them is called Beggar Chicken.  Later I will tell you more detail.

The Hotel 

We stayed at Amethyst Hotel on Qin Chun Road East.  The hotel was quite good and clean. As you can see from the pictures below, the room was OK.

Until I saw the bathroom wall that was made of glass.  Can you see the hanging towel ?  Then you could see the siluet of whoever taking a shower in there ... oh my goodness !!!

 the glass bathroom wall

the white towel hanging in the bathroom

Lying in bed and watching somebody's taking a shower ....
Whoever had this idea or designed it, must be errrrrhhh .... dangerously horrible. 
You know what, all the 5 hotels that we stayed during this trip have the glass bathroom wall.
I think it is happening in China, huh ?!

It's time for our lunch.

Hangzhou Cuisine

As usual our drinks were a pot of Chinese Tea, a big bottle of soft drinks, could be Coke or Sprite, and 2 bottles of local beer.  As we didn't drink beer, we asked them to change the beer with mineral water.  Unbelievable, the price of beer was cheaper than mineral water.

About 10 dishes were served - pork, beef, fish, prawn, chicken, duck, omelette, vegetables, soup, etc.  If you see the picture below, they all looked delicious. I'm not a picky-eater, ehm ... but the dishes were really really tasteless, plain, lack of spices, and too much oil.  The smell of pork was everywhere. They served about 3 kind of soups, and all were tasteless and too oily.  The dessert was always watermelon.

 Kwetiauw with pork

Fried chicken

 Sauted Bean Sprouts, this was OK

 Fried duck

 Fried Prawns

I learned not to have big expectation on foods here. The look might be OK, but the taste was far from OK. We often saved by only eating the omelettes and rice.  We finished our lunch and the left over were such a waste.  Food ... we're sorry. Seriously ...

Oh ... how I missed Indonesian Food.

to be continued

rgds,
Lucy