Hangzhou

08 Jul 2017 - Mateo Atwi

Shanghai is the last stop of this trip! I can't believe how fast time has flown by. It seems like just yesterday I entered China... Anyways this isn't the time for my goodbye blog post because the best has yet to come! If everything goes according to plan, my final china post will be 2 trains, 4 planes, and 5 cities.

This weekend I only did one day trip. I went to Hangzhou with George and Jonathon. It was very cool and peaceful. I enjoyed just walking and biking the whole day. It made me really tired. Hangzhou is an hour away from Shanghai by bullet train, and the main highlight is the West lake there. It is a very large lake with pagodas and other things surrounding it. The gardens were very nice and everything was beautiful. I enjoyed walking around some of the streets too. They have lots of nice architecture and shops.

There were ponds with lots of carp in them. I didn't get the best pictures, but there was a huge school swimming around of red and yellow fish.

We paid to enter the Leifeng Pogoda. It was built during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kindoms period, and built in 975 AD it is most notable for its use of escalators. The building collapsed in the 1900s, and in 2000 they build a new one with the remains of the old underneath it still visible.

On one of the floors they have a very elaborate wall display. The octagonal pagoda has eight panels of 3D carved wood detailing the story of Bai Suzhen, a goddess trapped underneath the Leifeng Pagoda. I was very impressed, and I would highly recommend seeing it in person!

This is the view from the top of the Leifeng Pogoda. If you open it up fully, then you will notice The City of God Pavilion to the right side atop a hill. The next panorama after is from the hill that the Pavilion is on. At night it looks really cool! Unfortunately, I had to head back to the train station, so I could not see it at night.

After climbing we went to the Southern Song Imperial Street. It was pretty cool, and it had a bunch of cool things like this one. At night, they rolled out a bunch of booths and had a street market. There was all sorts of delicious things... live large snails slimmed around, huge fried spiders, centipedes as long as their skewers and live grub/larvae thingies. We ate sushi.

I wish I had stayed in the city longer. It is very relaxing, but alas I have plenty of homework and Shanghai is large enough to get lost in for years. It has 34 million people in total.