Week 31: Breaking the Mold, or, Hanging in Hangzhou

Intermission - Foshan Again

From February 16 through 18 we were back in Foshan again. Our flight back into China was awesome. I booked a flight on Air Kenya only because it was the cheapest flight I could find. I was not expecting much, and truth be told was just keeping my fingers crossed that the place didn't suck.

Air Kenya had the fanciest airplane I have ever been on! The seats were huge and comfortable, and the windows were gigantic. They even mentioned in their intro video that they have the largest windows of any airline in existence. The food was very very good, and the in-flight movie selection was also great. I would seriously recommend Air Kenya to anyone.

We returned to Foshan and it was like a ghost town. We were just a few days away from Chinese New Year, which means that all of the people in the city that were not natives had left and gone to their hometowns. All the natives in Foshan were staying in their homes.

The airport, the subway, and the streets were all almost completely devoid of people. It was so shocking that I took pictures. I took pictures of the empty streets and subway cars.

Coming home was more than a little upsetting. Not only was our trip over, which is never fun, but the mold had gotten much worse in our apartment. Nobody had done any work at all! Not even a tiny little bit. There was mold all over our clothes and all over the bed furniture. Even stepping into the apartment was like stepping into a moldy, dank, soup.

It only took one night to realize that we had to get out. I did some browsing on my "sky scanner" app, and found some incredibly cheap tickets to Eastern China for the 18th. Like, no joke, the cheapest tickets to anywhere that I've ever seen. We booked them without much of a second thought.

And with that we were off to...

Hangzhou - City on a Lake

Hangzhou is a city famous for its lake. The West Lake isn't particularly big or important from an economic perspective, but it is definitely very beautiful. For thousands of years Chinese people have been coming to the lake and admiring its serene wonder. Many poems and stories are written about the lake, and it's basically one of the essential stops on a tour of China, especially if you are a Chinese person.

It really worked out that tickets were so cheap to this city. I am not entirely sure why it worked out so nicely. I think it may have something to do with the fact that the 18th was Chinese New Year's Eve. Chinese people are mostly at their homes at this point, having dinner and getting ready for fireworks.

The flight was short and pleasant, and not very crowded. We landed in Hangzhou and went to the taxi queue. I knew something was wrong pretty quickly. There was no one in the line and all the "taxi drivers" were just hanging out and smoking. Once they saw a potential customer they all started fighting each other for the right to "have us". One guy said he knew where we were going and told us to get into his car. I asked him how much and he tried to speak English to me. He said "seventy five", or something very close to it.

I knew something was wrong because there was no way it should have been that cheap. The reason we always go to the official taxi queue is in an attempt to avoid scammers. This guy seemed like a scammer, and my intuition was confirmed when he took us to the parking lot and passed us off to another group of "taxi drivers". One guy put us into his car and started driving. This was no taxi, either, but his personal car. I was angry, but there wasn't much that I could do. There were no official taxis out! It was almost midnight on New Year's Eve.

He took us to the hostel and them demanded 300RMB. 300 is about $50 US, which is insane. I told him that the other guy said 75, and he started screaming at us. I tried to negotiate but he wasn't having any of it. He started waving his arms pretty violently, and Laura threatened to call the police. After an hour of him pretending to know absolutely zero English, he suddenly understood everything we were saying. He definitely knew "police".

In the end he accepted 200, which was still a lot but was pretty standard to how far he drove us from the airport. This put a bit of a sour mood on the evening, and definitely characterized the second half of our February. Everyone seemed cutthroat and out to get us, and the tourists were even worse than the money takers.

The hostel was located inside of an outdoor mall area that had been built out of several historical buildings. It was like staying somewhere in feudal China, and the location was definitely the best part about this hostel. The interior was kind of crummy, and everything smelled really bad. I think there was a sewer nearby, or maybe some sort of sewage leak. The lobby was a tough place to hang out.

The bathrooms didn't smell like sewage, but they did smell like a whole lot of mold. The caretaker of the hostel told us that there was "something wrong with the water pipes" that caused the hot water only to work from 10pm until 6am every day. Maybe I was being too suspicious at this point, but I have a feeling he was just trying to save a few bucks.

Everything in Hangzhou was freezing! The weather forecast had indicated it was supposed to be sunny and in the mid 60s all week.  The forecast ended up being seriously wrong! It was cloudy, rainy, and cold the entire time. Hangzhou is far enough north of Foshan that the climate is quite different. In the Winter it actually snows occasionally. We did not pack very appropriately for the trip, so we had to wear layers of shirts and sweaters and jackets.

Every morning we would leave our bedroom and just be hit by a wall of cold. Our friendly money saving caretaker refused to heat the building. He also propped all the doors and windows open! It was usually 30 degrees when we got up in the morning, and this guy would have frost appearing inside the hostel.

Our rooms were a different story. It was cozy and warm, yes, but don't think for a minute that we were going to be able to sleep at all. We had the strangest assortment of Chinese roommates imaginable. There was one guy who snored incredibly loud. It was so loud that it shook my bed. It got to the point that we started trying to sleep during the day and go out at night, but this didn't help because this man slept ALL DAY. He would usually go to bed at 1am and then sleep until 5 or 6pm the next day. He would then get up and leave until 12 or 1am, and then sleep for another 15 or 16 hours.

Then we had this creeper guy who kept staring at us. Whenever we rolled over he would be watching and giggling. We caught him taking pictures of me a number of times, and eventually he asked if he could do a photo shoot of me.

Not to be outdone, there was the phone guy and the charger guy. The phone guy played with his phone all night long, with the brightness all the way up. This guy also had an alarm set for 5am that he would just let ring for two hours every morning. He was a real treat. The charger guy had to charge all of his devices at all times. Every bed was supplied with two power outlets, but he had at least 4 devices. Every time we came back to the room he would be sitting in Laura's bed or my bed, using all of our outlets too.

Hangzhou wasn't all bad though. The first evening we were there we explored the "old city" district. Everything looked beautiful and ancient, and there were fireworks and firecrackers going off all over the place. It was great to join in the revelry of a Chinese New Year.

The first full day that we had there was very enjoyable too. We spent the entire day walking around the lake. Say what you will about Hangzhou, but the beauty of the West Lake was not exaggerated in any way. It was chilly, for sure, but the sun was out and we just enjoyed taking in every single angle of the lake. There were lots of leisure boats floating along the surface, fully of touring passengers. One end of the lake had a mystical looking pagoda, while the entire place was surrounded by mountains.

As the morning progressed the pathways around the lake started to fill up. By the afternoon it was very slow going. Before the end of the day it was absolutely shoulder to shoulder. It was hard not to get a little bit stressed toward the end. Hundreds of thousands of tourists walking around, spitting and blowing snot rockets, leaving litter wherever they wanted.

Still, at this point we didn't let it spoil our day. We discovered some incredible street food at one stand. They were selling whole deep-fried crabs on a stick. Two crabs per stick only cost $1.50! These crabs were soft-shelled, and the deep fried cooking meant that you could just eat the buggers whole.

Hangzhou actually had a lot of good food. We went to a place called Waipo Jia for dinner (Grandma's house). This place has a reputation for being the best restaurant in the province. Clearly we weren't the only ones in on the secret either. The wait was nearly 2 hours before we were able to get seated. It may be the longest I've ever waited for a meal. We actually went to a different place to have a snack while we waited to eat!

The meal, I think, was worth it. We had some incredible dishes and a lot of local specialties. I spend a lot of time talking about when Chinese food is gross or when it's weird, but when it is good it is SO DARN GOOD!

Our second day in Hangzhou was much more disappointing. It rained the whole day, which made it difficult to go anywhere or do anything. Hangzhou has some nice mountains for hiking, and a pretty well known tea plantation nearby, but what with the weather those things were not very feasible. We ended up going to the pagoda and paying to go to the top. It was so crowded that it was just not fun at all.

I'm not proud to admit it, but Laura and I were both pretty cranky while we were in Hangzhou. The sheer number of people and the bad weather and our lack of sleep made the trip not too fun. Looking back though, I can pick out all the good parts, and I am really glad I got a chance to see the legendary West Lake.

Our next destination was a town called Suzhou. It was connected to Hangzhou by rail, which meant that we got to finally use China's ultramodern bullet train system. For a low price we got to travel at the astounding speed of 190 MPH.

In only a few hours we found ourselves in a new place!