3rd Day in Shanghai

Pond in the Hua Gang Park garden.
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Even though I found out that it the other hotel was only twenty minutes away, I still had to wake up at 6:30am again. The tour this morning left at 8:00am instead of 8:40am like the day before. There were six people on this tour to the City of Hangzhou the guy from Ohio from the previous day, two guys from Boston on vacation visiting a friend in China, and a business man from New York and his Chinese girlfriend. The city was over two and half hours away, so we started the tour with a really long bus ride and everyone pretty much just took a nap for the whole ride. We got to Hangzhou, which the tour guide said it was a small city with only 8 million people, but I guess that is small for China. The house we passed when we started to get close to the city looked out of place, since there were these new three story building with farms and fields in between them. The downtown had tall apartment buildings, skyscrapers, and lots of new building under construction. We stopped for lunch first due to the timing of when the boat tour left. Lunch was at another Chinese resturant and this one was much faster than the one the day before, but we didn't get much meat just chicken and fish with the head still on it. We also had eggplant, tofu, and cabbage which are not my favorite, but the food I did eat was really good. The next stop was the Hua Gang Park, which is one of the most famous garden's in Hangzhou. It is know for the ponds with Red Carp and the beautiful landscapes with water. The city of Hangzhou use to be full of canals and boats running throughout the city much like Veince in Italy, but most of the canals were removed or destroyed. There were some peacocks and one was completely white which was different. It also had some pine tree from the United States growing in the garden, which was given to the Chinese by president Nixon when he visited China. The West Lake Cruise left from just next to the garden, so we went straight from the garden over to the West Lake. We took about a thirty minute cruise around the harbor and the tour guide gave us a history about the lake, the surrounding buildings, and islands in the lake. After the cruise we got back on the bus and headed for the Ling Yin Temple, which is the largest Buddist temple in Hangzhou and was much larger than the other two Buddist temples I had been to on the other tours. The four heavenly kings and the buddah statues were also much larger. The temples location was selected by a monk from Indian, because the mountain next to temple reminded him of a sacred mountian in Indian. There were many buddahs carved into the mountains rock face, but all were recreations of the originals that were destroyed during China's Cultural Revolution. During this revolution the Red Guard destroyed all cultural and historical artifacts, including many historians and archeologists. The temple and one of the statues carved into the mountain were spared by putting General Mao's picture on them. The business man from New York and his girlfriend pretty much just wandered off on their own the whole time we were at the temple, so the tour guide told them to meet back at 3:00pm if they got separated from the group. They went off on their own taking pictures of everything and just wandering around. We finished the tour of the temple and went to the meeting spot to wait for them. We waited about twenty minutes and then headed back to the bus to see if they were there. Everyone knew that there was no way they were back at the bus, but we still had one more stop. We waiting another ten minutes at the bus and then headed for the Dragon Well Tea Village. The Dragon Well tea is the most famous green tea in China and the highest grade tea leaves are not exported due to the limited quantity and 70% is sent to Beijing for the high ranking officals. We got to see people picking the tea leaves and also a man drying them by hand in a steel bowl. They have to do it by hand, so that the tea leaves are not over dried or left to moist. If they are dried too much they lose their nutrients and flavor. If they aren't dried enough, then they can't be stored properly. The couple ended up taking a taxi to the tea village to meet back up with us before we headed back to Shanghai. The drive back took about three hours because of traffic and we were on the other side of Hangzhou. I just listened to my MP3 player and looked at the scenery was we drove back. I grabbed some dinner when we stopped at a truck stop for a bathroom break. I took a taxi back to my hotel when I got dropped off back at the Jin Jiang Hotel. When I got back to my hotel, I just watched some TV, wrote my blog, and went to bed.

The city of Hangzhou use to be full of canals and boats running throughout the city much like Veince in Italy, but most of the canals were removed or destroyed.