I worked a half day today because my friends were coming to Hangzhou from Shanghai for the weekend and I wanted to hang out with them. I've been working on my own little project for a while now without direction, but this is a purely personal project. Once I wrap this up (this being a complete manufacturing plan for a piece including fixturing and tool paths), I'm going to see what Michael has for me to do next.
I met my friends while they were having lunch at a place called Grandma's, which is not a little hole in the wall place as the name might imply, but rather a two story restaurant that is only accessible from the street by elevator. The food there was pretty standard for Hangzhou, but they ordered an awesome dessert that they offered me a portion of. It was blended mango with ice and condensed milk, kinda like mango ice cream. It was delicious. After lunch we walked around the West Lake for a while, taking in the sights and being sights ourselves as a relatively large grouping of laowai. We happened upon a few temples that were pretty, but would have likely been beautiful in a cleaner setting. The air and water pollution took a toll on the flora and fauna, which was less than impressive (in contrast to the picture they had posted of the same locations in better times). Around the West Lake, nature seems to be beautiful from afar, but disappointing up close.
The next stop on the great touristy trip of Hangzhou was to a famous shopping street that I completely forgot the name of, but it was a huge shopping street. It ran for the better part of a mile with a fairly consistent repetition of tea shops, food stalls and craft sellers. Unfortunately, most of the stuff there looked like it wouldn't survive the plane ride back to California, so I opted not to buy anything, but I was sorely tempted to buy that great Chinese souvenir, the dreamcatcher (seriously, they were everywhere with pictures of American Indians on them). I almost bought some deep fried ice cream (who knew China and the Texas state fair would have so much in common?) before being reminded of my friend Phil's story of getting salmonella from eating street food. I ended up chickening out. We went to dinner at a place called Angelo's that I had attempted to find twice previously, but had struck out. The restaurant is fairly well hidden on an alleyway off of a main road, not at all where you expect to find an expat hang out. Once we got there, it was marvelous. The food was fantastic and they had an impressive selection of different expat cuisine, including the best hamburger in Hangzhou (actually, one of the best I've ever had). I think we are definitely going to have to make a return trip here.
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| On the third try, I finally made it to Angelo's. It didn't disappoint. This restaurant would not be out of place in North Beach or along University Ave (except it cost about half as much). | One of the dishes we ordered was the Beijing Duck Pizza. My friend Alex said it wasn't a terribly good representation of Beijing Duck, but I didn't know the difference. Either way, it was delicious and perfectly passable as Italian pizza (surprise, Angelo is Italian) |
July 25
I slept in today, but not terribly long because I wanted to meet for lunch in Hangzhou. My friends told me to meet them at a tea house on the west side of the West Lake, which required me to take 3 buses to get to. Well, I took two of the buses without incident (K865 and B1), but things got interesting with the third bus (K27). I waited for half an hour with no bus showing up, so I decided to walk to a different bus stop to catch another bus that would get me to the tea house by a more circuitous route (Y3). Well, while between bus stops I was passed by both the Y3 and K27 buses, putting me SOL for another half an hour. I decided that I shouldn't make my friends wait and grabbed a cab to take me to the restaurant. However, the directions my friend Chris gave me were misinterpreted and I ended up about a mile from where I needed to be. After playing some serious phone tag, I found Chris and we sat down to eat. My timing was impeccable, as the server brought our food just as I was sitting down. It took me a second to realize it, but this tea house (creatively called Green Tea) was not at all what I was expecting. It was a serious restaurant, while I was expecting it to be focused on the tea with a little bit of food as an after thought. Either way, the food was tasty (that seems to be a repeating fact about China) and this place actually stood out as quite different from the other places I've eaten in China; my favorite dish was homemade bread with ice cream, which was served as a sliced up loaf of bread topped with ice cream. It sounds stupid, but it was actually very tasty, probably because the bread was very creamy.
After lunch we walked next door to the China National Tea Museum which was focused on the most famous tea from Hangzhou, Longjing Tea, but covers other types of tea. Now, I like tea, probably a lot more than the average person, but even I thought this was excessive. I'm sure tea culture is very interesting to some people, but I was surprised by how much attention and research was paid to it. Either way, the area around the museum was absolutely beautiful. It was lush and green and it was incredibly difficult to believe that we were no more than 30 minutes from the drab grey of Hangzhou. The mountains around the West Lake are practically a different world. The area actually reminded me of Yosemite, where the natural beauty of the area is the focus, but there is a lot of well integrated development. We sat for a tea ceremony which involved a lot of ritual and disappointingly little tea, although I was not expecting to actually be able to taste the difference between different steepings of the same tea leaves. Perhaps there is something to tea culture.
When we left the tea ceremony, it was about time for my friends to return to Shanghai, so we all hopped in a cab to the train station where they would catch a train and I would catch a bus back to Xiasha. It turns out that the cabbie got up to the train station much quicker than expected because we ended up with an hour to kill. After wandering around the train station and area immediately surrounding the train station, we gave up on being interested and sat down. While sitting we noticed that we were getting a lot of stairs, so we tried to pimp ourselves out to having our pictures taken for 5 kuai, but we had no takers. Oh well.
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| Me in the tea growing fields surrounding the China National Tea Museum | The sign for the China National Tea Museum |
July 26
Back to work. Finishing up the project I've been working on by finishing the fixturing. Our basketball game against the police is some time this week, but the day hasn't been nailed down yet. I found out that Michael won't be able to go to the soccer game this weekend, so I think it's going to be just me and Phil, possibly Ricardo, but he doesn't really like soccer. We'll see if the promise of good company and scintillating conversation can convince him to come.
People taller than me count: 3 (Angelo, the owner of Angelo's, is 6'5")
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