Adorable Asian Pose... activaaaaaate!

Hi ho. Hi ho. It's off to Hangzhou we go. After chilling around the suburbs, for day #2 I figured we'd go into town. So after waking up, we caught the bus into beautiful Hangzhou for the day. Except this time, we were accompanied by the lovely Jessie to serve as our bilingual guide. We met her in a street market very popular with tourists, in front of the ancient Chinese restaurant known as "McDonalds".

Unfortunately, my hand could not be saved.

There are plenty of pictures of the place on Facebook, but it's basically exactly that. An entire street with shop after shop. Looking western gets the price tripled unless marked, so bring your haggling hat. What they do have however, is some pretty awesome stuff on the cheap if you can talk the talk. They also have the famous "alleyway of food", where I quite like the pita bread filled with cumin fried meat and veg. It is as delicious as it sounds, I promise you.

Dan and I got a chance to defile some presumably ancient statue, as seen on the left. Oh, and you see that shop advertising the 10? Those are silk scarves, and they're 10 RMB each. For those of you doing the math, that's about $1.75 each. For silk. Granted there's little margin, but I've bought them for 9 RMB before. There is no shame in my frugality.

After we had our fill of shopping we took a bus over to the famous West Lake. I think this is where everyone got to experience the real China. This bus was standard bus size. That being said, I think all of China crammed into that bus. You get the hilarious phenomenon of when there is no more room for people to step on the first step, the people that want on start pushing. I half expect some startled Chinese man to go flying out the other door. I actually had a pretty sweet spot next to the driver, so I got a nice breeze. The others, not so lucky. Dan, being his tall self, communicated back and forth with me using a series of carefully orchestrated hand signals.

漂亮！

Right so, we hop off at West Lake. We briefly dashed along, and then stopped at a very nice park. There are just too many pictures of this place to do it justice, but this is my favorite and current desktop wallpaper. Before we got there, people were standing on those rocks and taking photos. However some vice cop came along and started shouting at people to get down. Later I would come to learn that his family died in a vicious flower attack only days earlier. He was trying to protect us while holding back the tears.

After another quick jaunt around West Lake (I chased a bird), we decided to head back to the market for dinner. Unfortunately it was a long walk, and being rush hour, hard to find a bus or cab. We eventually found this old, gross looking dude with a van who offered to take us back for a respectable sum. Before telling this guys story, I want to emphasize this may be my favorite part of the day.

See, this guy was gross. His van was gross. He spoke very fast Chinese. He did however, speak in an accent I could understand. Which meant I could sort of understand what he was saying some of the time. I can tell you he was perverted, which amused me. He asked where we were from, and kept complimenting how beautiful Lindsay and Jessie were. He was just having a blast driving foreigners around, and kept rolling down the window to yell at people. Keep in mind we were going about 5 MPH in this traffic, so it was perfectly reasonable. Anyway he just wanted more passengers, and thought the best way is to heckle everyone into coming. I decided, this guy is awesome, I want to help him out, but how? Clearly a westerner yelling terrible Chinese was the only solution. So I mustered up my limited Chinese knowledge to come up with something I could say. The fruits of my labor were "Don't you want to come with us foreigners? We're very pretty!" What a sight that must have been. A beat up old van with a crazy asian person and a crazy white person yelling at people on the street. We did however, get two more passengers. I call that mission success.

After a lengthy ride we went to a famous Hangzhou restaurant, but the wait was just too long. So instead we ate at a rather awesome hibachi grill. After that we got a guy with a van to drive us back home, with some passing out on the way back. They also insist I told the guy wrong directions, which I admit, I did. But I had a GPS, and it at most added 10 minutes to the trip. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, no matter how wrong Aaron is.


See you, Hangzhou.