My China Trip / 走遍中国: My trip to Jiangnan China(Hangzhou, Zhejiang)

25/3 my father and I went to Hangzhou, a famous tourist hotspot. There's a saying in China: There's heaven above, down below we have Su & Hang. Su refers to Suzhou, which I'm going to talk about it later. Now we are going to Hang, which refers to Hangzhou. You can easily go there by train or coach from Shanghai. It's only about 1 hour by train from there. We went there from Changzhou, my aunt's place. It's also convenient. We went by coach and coach trip is no more the same as before. The coaches are quite new and all imported from foreign countries. They are very comfortable and not much difference from Japan. Road condition is also fantastic nowadays. So for such a distance it only took us 2.5 hours to go there and 2 hours coming back. I guess going there is going up the slope and coming back is down since Zhejiang Provence is higher than Jiangsu. Halfway through we arrived at the highway stop. The building was also more or less like the one in developed countries.

One of the stopover along Hu-Ning Highway

By noon we reached Hangzhou. Soon many people gathered around us and promoted their lodging and transport. We chose the one who claimed they belong to the Government simply because the private one usually could not be trusted. The woman(in her 50's) offered to drive us there and told us their hotel was 3-star hotel and RMB200 per night after discount. We followed her. Though we found the hotel did not look like 3-star as what she said, we still agreed to stay there since we did not want to waste too much time on finding hotels and her one looked acceptable. (a standard room with attached bathroom, with TV, hot water supply and a shower set) After we settled down, the woman persuaded us to join there 1 day tour for the following day. We told her we'd like to do so, the only thing we worried about whether we could catch the last coach to go home. She reassured us by saying it should be no problem at all because the trip would end at 5:00pm and the last coach would at 7:15pm and since the hotel and coach were belong to the same company, she could arrange everything in a package. So we accepted. (You'll hear more about this in my next day's blog)

We had our lunch in a small local restaurant. One of the most important parts of traveling is tasting the local delicacies. Hangzhou dishes are noted for their elaborate preparation, sophisticated cooking and refreshing taste. There are many famous dishes worth trying like Dongporou (braised pork), Jiaohuaji (a chicken baked in clay), xihucuyu (vinegar coated fish fresh caught from the lake), etc. Yummy.. and cheap.

After food, we went to Hu Xue Yan's former residential house. It was more than a hundred years old and it was so luxuriously built. Even today we could tell that this was one of the most prestigious families at the time. Hu was a successful businessman as well as a high rank government official. That's why he could accumulate his wealth in such a short time. From there we could see corruption was nothing new, it started long time back. The wood used was a top kind of camphor wood and you could see all the carving so much in detail either on the wood panels or on the walls. The garden was nice too. It was so big that we could not believe it belonged to only one family. Artificial hills and ponds were everywhere. There were so many halls that I even lost my count. Second floor were all chambers for the family. He had countless of concubines, each of them had her own building and a group of servants.

At the entrance of Hu Xue Yan's former residential house

The entrance

Isn't the carving so vivid? It's a mixture of mud, glutinous rice and some other ingredients

My father sitting in front of one of the halls there

Outside the hall

Inside one of the halls -- Bai Shi Lou

Inside the same hall

The kitchen

The courtyard

Another hall -- Yuan Yang Ting

The carving

Another hall

The courtyard

One of the building

The courtyard

Then we carried on to Qing He Fang, a replica of a commercial street of Song Dynasty. It's just beside Hu's House, about 5-10 mins by walk. Everything there was still kept according to the Song's style. Shops selling local products were along both sides. The most famous one tourists must buy were tea (Xi Hu Long Jing), silk, Lotus root paste (Xi Hu Ou Fen), etc. But must be very careful. The local people were very cunning. One got very easily cheated there. For eg, when they filled up tea in a can, the way they did was super fast. We could not see properly. Tea was very expensive, so if you bought many cans, one or two were empty, you would lose a lot. Worse case was you bought as a gift for your friend. Not only losing money, but also embarrassing yourself. Bargain was a must, usually started from the half of the price they offered you.