Sorry for the long break in between parts one and two, the rest will be coming very soon along with pictures from Beijing!
Part Two: Hangzhou - A Lake, a Climbing Store, and a Duck (all picked to live in a city, and to see what happens, The Real World... Hangzhou)... sorry i have to appologize again, but I had to.
A trip anywhere from Wenling must first begin with a bus ride somewhere. Wenling is a city of 1.5 million and everyday we find out how big it really is. You can drive nearly an hour to the coast… and its still Wenling. You can drive to other schools 30 minutes away and the cities they are in are technically part of Wenling. (More on those stories in later blogs). Knowing all of this there is no airport near by, or even a train station. There is one airport about 1 hour away, but it doesn't fly too many places and is very expensive. So why not take the opportunity to stop in the beautiful city of Hangzhou before we fly out to Beijing. And there we can meet friends!
We arrived in Hangzhou around noon on Saturday and had to buy our return tickets for a week later when we got back from Beijing. You can't buy bus tickets online and if we would wait for the day of, chances are there would be no available buses. We got in line at the bus station, with the normal stares from everyone around us. What was funny is no one was staring at what the woman had in a sack in a line next to us. As we waited in line I heard this very loud QUACK! I looked around and saw not a woman or a man in farm clothes, but a girl who looked about in her twenties wearing fashionable clothes like any other you see walking down the street. No she was not making the noise, but she was holding a burlap sack with this animal poking its long neck out. The duck kept looking around a quacking at everything and pick at the bag. No one seemed to stare at the bag-o-duck, but certainly at the 4 foreigners.
We continued our trip by visiting our friends Jackie and Cammie. Well Jackie was teaching, and Cammie was going to take a nap, but first they ordered us some Pizza Hut. It's not like any of us had been craving Western food, but CHEESE! Cheese doesn't exist in Wenling. Not many dairy products do, and the ones that do, kind of taste funky. So Cammie, James, Bracha, Tabitha and I all proceeded to devour 4 medium/large pizzas (not exactly sure which it was, everything in China's smaller). The girls said they had never eaten so much pizza before. It was a normal occasion for James and I, especially after being used to the college favorite of Dominoes 3 mediums for 5 dollars each, where you get two friends at 1 am and each of you eats a whole medium pizza while studying up on your Hebrew. What a lovely tradition!
We took the next few hours to relax after our strenuous work of riding a bus for 4 hours and eating so much pizza. After our lovely naps, the four of us Wenlingers headed out. We walk around the college and then headed down towards the large stadium (on our next journey to Hangzhou I will be sure to get a picture of this stadium and post it, one of the coolest stadiums around, and it's named "Yellow Dragon," SWEET). James G had received a tip from a source in a near by bike shop that there might be… dunt dunt dun!... a climbing store there! The rest of us Wenlingers were plenty glad to journey down there so we could finally end James G's search for climbing gear that had occupied his life for the last few weeks. He was successful and stocked up on most of the things he needed, hoping to get a few last things that might be cheaper in Beijing.
The next day we decided to head down to West Lake again. We went towards a temple and a few tombs of some famous Chinese guys. We ended up skipping to temple due to the amount of other tourists there, and because… well… we couldn't really find the entrance. So we decided to follow a few people down some back ally ways, because there seemed to be something back there. We finally reached this amazing hill covered in trees and beautiful views with walkways. There were tons of other tourists here too but with the forest it felt a little better. We journeyed up to a tea house whose owners really wanted us to stay and have a drink, but we instead walked right on through. Behind the tea house was one of the most pleasant surprises of my entire trip. We soon found ourselves standing in some sort of caves with Buddhist altars and incense all around. Other tourists were ahead of us so we knew it was ok to be there. The caves had all kinds of old writings on them and carvings like nothing else we'd seen before or since then. We then finished climbing the hill to get a breath taking view of West Lake. Along with West Lake we could see the millions of tourists that were in Hangzhou for the holidays. Hangzhou is probably the second biggest city for tourism during that week because of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Number 1 of course is Beijing, which we would soon find out about. Near by there was a company picnic with people from… you guessed it… Amway! Your friendly pyramid scheme company we're all so familiar with already! They tried to get us to join in some of their games but as a quick rainstorm moved in, the whole picnic ran for cover.
We finished our tour of sightseeing around West Lake and tried to find some taxis to get home, eat some food and get to the airport. Did a mention there were a lot of tourists in Hangzhou? It took us forever to find taxis back home so we had to hurry making our noodles and pb and j sandwiches. But we got to the airport, after catching a shuttle bus with plenty of time. We were all pretty tired after all the walking we had done the last two days in Hangzhou. But oh the excitement! Tonight we would be in Beijing! And oh the fun that awaited us in the first hours of arriving in Beijing…
Stay tuned boys and girls to see what happens to our heroes in the next episode! Don't miss it
Part Three: Beijing - Hostile Hostels, "one little, two little, three thousand… wow that’s a huge temple!!!!"
Part Two: Hangzhou - A Lake, a Climbing Store, and a Duck (all picked to live in a city, and to see what happens, The Real World... Hangzhou)... sorry i have to appologize again, but I had to.
A trip anywhere from Wenling must first begin with a bus ride somewhere. Wenling is a city of 1.5 million and everyday we find out how big it really is. You can drive nearly an hour to the coast… and its still Wenling. You can drive to other schools 30 minutes away and the cities they are in are technically part of Wenling. (More on those stories in later blogs). Knowing all of this there is no airport near by, or even a train station. There is one airport about 1 hour away, but it doesn't fly too many places and is very expensive. So why not take the opportunity to stop in the beautiful city of Hangzhou before we fly out to Beijing. And there we can meet friends!
We arrived in Hangzhou around noon on Saturday and had to buy our return tickets for a week later when we got back from Beijing. You can't buy bus tickets online and if we would wait for the day of, chances are there would be no available buses. We got in line at the bus station, with the normal stares from everyone around us. What was funny is no one was staring at what the woman had in a sack in a line next to us. As we waited in line I heard this very loud QUACK! I looked around and saw not a woman or a man in farm clothes, but a girl who looked about in her twenties wearing fashionable clothes like any other you see walking down the street. No she was not making the noise, but she was holding a burlap sack with this animal poking its long neck out. The duck kept looking around a quacking at everything and pick at the bag. No one seemed to stare at the bag-o-duck, but certainly at the 4 foreigners.
We continued our trip by visiting our friends Jackie and Cammie. Well Jackie was teaching, and Cammie was going to take a nap, but first they ordered us some Pizza Hut. It's not like any of us had been craving Western food, but CHEESE! Cheese doesn't exist in Wenling. Not many dairy products do, and the ones that do, kind of taste funky. So Cammie, James, Bracha, Tabitha and I all proceeded to devour 4 medium/large pizzas (not exactly sure which it was, everything in China's smaller). The girls said they had never eaten so much pizza before. It was a normal occasion for James and I, especially after being used to the college favorite of Dominoes 3 mediums for 5 dollars each, where you get two friends at 1 am and each of you eats a whole medium pizza while studying up on your Hebrew. What a lovely tradition!
We took the next few hours to relax after our strenuous work of riding a bus for 4 hours and eating so much pizza. After our lovely naps, the four of us Wenlingers headed out. We walk around the college and then headed down towards the large stadium (on our next journey to Hangzhou I will be sure to get a picture of this stadium and post it, one of the coolest stadiums around, and it's named "Yellow Dragon," SWEET). James G had received a tip from a source in a near by bike shop that there might be… dunt dunt dun!... a climbing store there! The rest of us Wenlingers were plenty glad to journey down there so we could finally end James G's search for climbing gear that had occupied his life for the last few weeks. He was successful and stocked up on most of the things he needed, hoping to get a few last things that might be cheaper in Beijing.
The next day we decided to head down to West Lake again. We went towards a temple and a few tombs of some famous Chinese guys. We ended up skipping to temple due to the amount of other tourists there, and because… well… we couldn't really find the entrance. So we decided to follow a few people down some back ally ways, because there seemed to be something back there. We finally reached this amazing hill covered in trees and beautiful views with walkways. There were tons of other tourists here too but with the forest it felt a little better. We journeyed up to a tea house whose owners really wanted us to stay and have a drink, but we instead walked right on through. Behind the tea house was one of the most pleasant surprises of my entire trip. We soon found ourselves standing in some sort of caves with Buddhist altars and incense all around. Other tourists were ahead of us so we knew it was ok to be there. The caves had all kinds of old writings on them and carvings like nothing else we'd seen before or since then. We then finished climbing the hill to get a breath taking view of West Lake. Along with West Lake we could see the millions of tourists that were in Hangzhou for the holidays. Hangzhou is probably the second biggest city for tourism during that week because of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Number 1 of course is Beijing, which we would soon find out about. Near by there was a company picnic with people from… you guessed it… Amway! Your friendly pyramid scheme company we're all so familiar with already! They tried to get us to join in some of their games but as a quick rainstorm moved in, the whole picnic ran for cover.
We finished our tour of sightseeing around West Lake and tried to find some taxis to get home, eat some food and get to the airport. Did a mention there were a lot of tourists in Hangzhou? It took us forever to find taxis back home so we had to hurry making our noodles and pb and j sandwiches. But we got to the airport, after catching a shuttle bus with plenty of time. We were all pretty tired after all the walking we had done the last two days in Hangzhou. But oh the excitement! Tonight we would be in Beijing! And oh the fun that awaited us in the first hours of arriving in Beijing…
Stay tuned boys and girls to see what happens to our heroes in the next episode! Don't miss it
Part Three: Beijing - Hostile Hostels, "one little, two little, three thousand… wow that’s a huge temple!!!!"
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