Exploring Shanghai

We took a really comfy train to Hangzhou, a “small” Chinese city of about 6 million people. I’m excited about exploring this city, it’s supposed to be the prettiest city in all of China. Locals have told me that Chinese people call Hangzhou “Heaven”, because it’s so beautiful. A lot of Chinese poetry is also inspired by the West Lake in Hangzhou.

We had huge problems getting a proper taxi, and spent about half an hour to get one the first time we tried. Rush hour and shift changes were appearantly the reason for this. Eventually, we gave up and got into a trike taxi, which is a small moped with an extra seat in the back. Here’s Kelly in front of the taxi. It was slow and uncofortable, but incredibly agile through the traffic. These are pure gold in rush hour!

We got a tiny moped tricycle taxi to the lake

The lake really was beautiful, and incredibly huge! I did not expect this size, I was more like half expecting to be able to walk around it. But that trek would take me days, and with the cold rain, that was not really an option 🙂

We were fortunate to walk past the musical fountain just when it was about to start. The show was beautiful, classical music combined with hundreds of dancing streams of water in different lights.

Musical fountain in Hangzhou

Hangzhou has a night market, which moves around a bit. We went there to try and get some good bargains. It was incredibly crowded, and I put all my stuff in my front pockets to avvoid being pickpocketed, even if I’ve seen zero crime so far in China. (Except the tea house prices the first day, real tourist trap that one!)

We found a few items, and haggled fiercely. We probably offended a few of the salesmen during our learning process, but we got an agreement with a couple of them. Some refused to haggle, we eventually found that only about half of them would actually haggle, the rest only used fixed price. I kinda preferred the haggle for fun, but in the long run the fixed price would be a lot more convenient.

The night market was a lot of fun!

One eager traveller, excited to explore another city!

We realized that the train platform kinda looked like the Harry Potter movie, and I just had to do a phoon of running into the column.

Tags: 1

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 3:04 am and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.