Dynamic Tourism, China, Business

Went to Hangzhou last weekend and had a late evening arrival Friday

Saturday morning started off with walks in the hills around the Longjing Tea Village.  Longjing is special kind of green tea that is grown in Hangzhou, of which the West Lake variety is said to be the best.  It is famous as a tea of the Chinese emperors, and it also has many health properties. To continue our study of tea we went to the China International Tea Museum, which has 2 floors explaining the history and preparation and proper drinking methods of every imaginable variety of tea. Tea did, in fact, originate in China where it was initially ground up, made into cakes prior to the development of the drinking style of tea. From China, drinking tea spread to Japan, Korea, India, and from India to Britain.

The afternoon took us back downtown to the incredibly expansive Grand Canal Museum.  The Grand Canal connected Hangzhou (south of Shanghai) to Beijing by water during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. While I didn’t get to see all of the museum, which doesn’t have much in English anyway, I did get to ride on the Grand Canal under old(-looking) bridges and past modern highrises and imagine when this was the most important N-S transportation way in China.

Late afternoon brought Al and I to a blind massage place, followed by a walk around the night market and dinner at Crazy Barbecue, where I had the spiciest thing I’ve ever eaten, and I can handle spicy. I had tears streaming down my face 2 bites in, mouth on fire and blindly numb, drank 3 bottles of refreshments and was still dying. Eventually coconut milk eased the burden, but it wasn’t until much much later in the evening I recovered full feeling in my mouth.

Sunday morning the first stop was the 6 Harmonies Pagoda (六和塔), where I climbed all 13 storeys of the Pagoda and was rewarded with expansive views of the city. Then back down and climbing the hills behind the pagoda are lots of replicas of pagodas from all over China. While the Chinese claim the invention and/or discovery of many things, they admit that pagodas originated from India where stupas were a common facet of Buddhist architecture.   After wandering through the hillsides, we went and had a very sweet, very gooey, but very good donut–all the calories burned from climbing the hills, replenished.

After another massage, this time a surprisingly affordable Thai massage (yes, it was a very indulgent weekend), we went for Muslim food.  Amazing that you can eat such great hummus in a place like Hangzhou, along with Greek salad, mutton, and pita bread. While for us the Muslim food was certainly the appeal of the place, all the Chinese diners were eating Chinese food or spaghetti.  Even though  right after lunch has got to be the worst time for going clothes shopping, I wanted to go back to a store I’d bought a couple dresses at on my year before’s trip to Hangzhou.  Can you believe it–the store still existed and was still in the same place! So after doing a little shopping on HeFang Pedestrian Street, we decided to test our luck with the bewitching hour, the time between 4-6pm when its nearly impossible to get a cab in Hangzhou.

And with that, it was the end of my 2nd, 2-day trip to Hangzhou and yet I still haven’t seen everything worth noting in this historically rich city of China.