Day 9
We woke up and went to a hotel breakfast that was traditional Chinese. We tried a rice cake bun shaped like a star that was great. I've also been able to try a lot of new fruit, there was one that looked like a fuzzy dark red golf ball that we bought from a street vendor that was fantastic it tasted sort of like a cross between cherry and raspberry. This morning I tried longanberries (not to my taste) and some grape shaped dried red fruit that I liked.
After breakfast Li Feng, Evan, and I went for a walk along the canal. It was a lot less crowded and the weather was less unpleasant. The last couple of days have been in the mid 90s and humid but at 8AM it took me at least 5 minutes to start pouring sweat.
We got back on our bus and headed to a tea plantation where they demonstrated tea making and packaging and fed us an enormous lunch. A few of the dishes are things I am beginning to think of as typical: eggs with tomato, mushrooms, pork. There were also half a dozen new dishes to try, including new dishes with chicken and fish.
After the tea Plantation lunch we went to a Chinese amusement park that had various recreations of rich men's houses and themed attractions that fell sort of flat. The haunted houses were walked, single file, but so poorly lit that we had trouble seeing our way and eventually the Chinese people around us used their phones as a flashlights which improved it greatly. It claimed to be the most popular such park in China with 7 million visitors a year. The heat was intense, about 100 degrees. I bought a mung bean and green tea popsicle.
Fortunately we were befriended by six Chinese people about Joshua's age who explained things, like the red ribbons hung on bridges that symbolized wishes of couples. Hanging out with them turned what would have been an awful hot day into a great one. I had a great time inappropriately teasing the young women who asked to take pictures with us until Andrea made me quit. We did take some nice pictures and they promised to email them to me and to friend me on Facebook.
After the amusement park we went to West Lake (there are 800 West Lakes in China but this is the most famous). We rode around the lake in a boat, seeing the town on one side and the mountains on the others, thethree lucky stones featured on the back of a one Yuan bill, and the three famous causeways built about a thousand years ago. We were then given an opportunity to walk along one of the causeways but even though the temperature had dropped to 99 (feels like 124, according to Google) Andrea, Zachary and I sat on a bench and watched the world go by.
We picked a particularly hot year to visit according to or if our new Chinese acquaintances. I am trying not to take it personally that Andrea said things in the heart of the day like "I can't stand to touch you."
On the way back to the bus Ari adjudication for a huge mango and ice cream concoction. I bought two. Neither got finished but they are delicious and helped us cool off.
We checked into the hotel in Hangzhou and went to look for dinner. We ran into four of our new friends in the elevator and they joined us. We ate at the closest reasonably priced restaurant that we could find. Our friends helped us order and when we finished the waitress declared that we had not ordered enough for nine people. We said that they should choose dishes and after some debate they ordered a couple.
We've noticed a few things about Chinese restaurants. First, there is always good leftover, a lot of food, enough to feed another 4 or 5 people. Second, no matter what you order, they always fail to bring something. Today it was a vegetable dish that I asked for, yesterday it was bottled water that we asked for three times, the day before that it was a fruit salad. Third, they often wrap each place seeing in shrink wrap. Fourth, they serve a lot of boiled water and a lot of tea at every meal and the Chinese people drink very little of either.
After dinner, Joshua headed off with our new friends and Andrea and I went back to the hotel.
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