Hangzhou Day 1

So today was interesting. Last night, I went to bed ~11pm, so not too terribly bad, but I fell asleep watching the Olympics and never even thought about setting my alarm. Well, today we were supposed to wake up early to go to Hangzhou – breakfast was supposed to be at 8 and leave by 8:30. Unfortunately, I woke up at 8:15 and hadn’t even packed. Not 2 minutes after I woke up, Nate’s aunt came knocking on our door asking, I assume, if we were up, I was still quite groggy as I opened the door and tried explaining then quickly got frustrated at the language barrier in my tiredness, but I think she understood. I packed and was ready in 15 minutes – I’m quite proud of that feat. I went down, then, for breakfast, where I ate 5 xiaolongbaos. I swear, they’re my new favorite breakfast food. I’m going to miss them when I go back to the states. I also ate another salted egg for breakfast – not my favorite. I’m still amazed that at breakfast everyday, we’ve all been having milk. I always thought that most Asians were lactose intolerant, so they couldn’t handle anything more than soy milk. I guess I was wrong.

We found out that we were going to only spend one night in Hangzhou, so I went upstairs to repack so I only brought one bag instead of two. This time, I brought my suitcase and nate brought his duffle bag, whereas in nanjing it was the opposite. After I was done packing, I checked my email, and it turns out that Jerry, the CEO of AJC international, got his assistant to set up a tour of their Shanghai facilities for us before we have our flight on Friday. That should be pretty fun, but we don’t know what Fei Fei has planned for us yet, so tomorrow we’re going to call and see if this is ok before we confirm with AJC. On another note, Seancy asked for me to bring back some Shanghai brand cigarettes for him, which practically no one here has ever heard about. I also got an email from him saying that you can only find them in Shanghai, which makes sense as to why we haven’t been seeing them.

Around 9:30, we left for Hangzhou. I remember thinking about insights I’d had since the last time I’d written, and I came up with two topics. However, I fell asleep after coming up with these two topics, so I only remember one. Jackie Chan is a pop star here. Like, he’s a 50 some year old Britney Spears here, no joke. Jackie Chan is part of a quartet that sings You and Me, the Olympics song this year, which is so funny to me because I had no idea he could sing. Another person who sings in the quartet is probably the most unattractive woman I’ve ever seen. She looks like a short (maybe 5 feet tall) middle aged man. But she has got an AMAZING voice. Hang Hao I think is her name, and she’s from Tibet. Mental note: get her music on itunes. (p.s. bo, I’ve heard jay chou on the radio and on tv here! Apparently they make fun of him b/c you never can make out what he’s saying).

You know, for having slept 9 hours, you wouldn’t think I could sleep another 2 hours in the car on the way to our destination, but I did.

We checked into a famous, beautiful hotel on Xihu lake here in hangzhou. This is the greenest (literally, not environmentally) city I’ve seen yet, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. The entire lake area is filled with trees, water, and small shops/restaurants. There are a lot of people, but it didn’t seem as “city” as the rest of China I’ve seen. Much later, we drove around a bit, and we found the city proper, which was more like the rest of what we’ve seen, and seems to be more “American” than the rest of the ones we’ve seen (wider roads, more American food places and shops, etc).

After we checked in, we left to go find lunch. Miao Miao and Thomas didn’t really know the area either, so we went exploring. We eventually got to this one place and ordered baby clams (OMG so good), tea cake, chinese bbq - pork, shrimp with fruit balls (dragon fruit, watermelon, canteloup; served warm), tofu with something, beef wrapped around mushrooms/fungus (omg I could survive on all the mushrooms they serve in china), a couple dim sum things, and green tea pudding for desert. For a beverage, we had sour plum juice, which was like a very sweet lemonade – delish!

When we got done, we drove to a Buddhist temple/park area. Once we got an English speaking tour guide (very strong accent, I had to get nate to translate a lot), and started on our way. The first place we stopped were some statues of guards to the area. One sneeze from these stone guards and you die, or so we were told. Behind them were statues of the supposed builder of this area and his two students. I quickly snapped a picture because I thought it was cool, but was soon told that it was rude and awkward and that I shouldn’t do that anymore. Or rather, if you believe in it, it’s rude; but since I don’t believe it’s not so bad, or something to that effect. I took that to mean that I shouldn’t take pictures of things unless I saw other people taking pictures. When we entered the cave, we saw carvings that were 1,000 years old, just the beginning of seeing relics of that age. Among the carvings were statues and carvings of a laughing Buddha, the goddess of mercy, and the monkey king that we had heard about in a story at the summer palace. Upon hearing about the goddess of mercy, I was a little confused, but I pushed it to the back of my mind. It wasn’t until we got to the temple itself and saw all the deities and different forms of Buddha that my prior concept of Buddhism was crumpled up into a little ball and thrown out the window. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Before entering the temple, Miao Miao bought some incense. It turns out that she bought it for Nate and I to pray at the temple. Before we went into the room, she showed us how to bow/pray in front of a Buddha, where you sit on a prayer pad and basically bow 3 times while asking in your mind whatever you’re asking for (a lot of Buddhas were there to ask for wealth, actually. And for baby boys.). Needless to say, I wasn’t quite into the whole bowing thing, but I held my incense with dignity in front of the statue, thought my little thoughts, and then we just threw away the incense even though it was only partially burnt. Personally, it was a strange experience for me. At first, I felt like I was praying to an idol, which I grew up being told not to do, but upon further consideration, I realized that it was the same thing as praying at an alter with a cross on the wall behind it. You’re not praying to the cross, but who/what the cross symbolizes – it helps you focus. Or at least that’s my opinion. The other thing I thought was weird was the thought of praying to not God. This was the second thing that started to make me think that my concept of Buddhism was skewed. I thought the point of Buddhism was that there’s not a “god” per se, but that the point of the religion was just to achieve nirvana through the 8 fold path and many, many reincarnations. Again, this was knowledge brought up from 9th grade history, but I thought it was a relatively sturdy foundation, and at least somewhat close to the truth. I hadn’t seen anything to disprove this conclusion, anyways.

Well, when we walked into the temple, We started being told stories about the gynormous Buddha in front of us (the biggest one in china; not the oldest, as it was destroyed and rebuilt in the 1950s), as well as the guards to the sides of him. I was getting more and more confused, and then when we got to the other side, there was a huge statue of the goddess of mercy that was talked about before. At this point, I had to stop. I began to doubt the vague stories the tour guide was giving and had to stop nate and ask what on earth was going on in Chinese Buddhism that there were deities and different Buddhas. Apparently, there’s Buddha Buddha. Then there are reincarnations of Buddha (like this one statue of one of the few female versions, who was a bad Buddha because she ate/killed children because her own child died). They are also on the same tier of gods/goddesses/deities that people prayed to. For instance, earlier in the caves, we saw a laughing Buddha, who was a past Buddha, but also a Buddha who will come in the future or somesuch. The bottom tier are actually not buddhas, but more like priests or somesuch that were cool guys, I guess. Like I said, I crumpled my past concepts of Buddhism and tried to start afresh. I still don’t entirely believe that I could have thought what I thought and also have this be true at the same time, so I think I’ve just missed some (or a lot) of details. Perhaps I will look into this more later.

Once we got through the main parts, we sat down for a rest in a gift shop area. Pretty soon after we sat down, a young couple sat down beside Miao Miao, and they asked her if 1) I would take a picture with tem and 2) if she would take the picture. I got a chuckle out of it and went out to take a shot with them. These two were more touchy feely than the last guy who had asked meand grabbed my arm and stuff for the picture, but I just shrugged it off. They didn’t mean any harm. After we went back in, we left to go look at another temple area thing that had 500 statues of the third tier people. Some of them were humorous looking – we saw one guy smoking pretty shapes like Gandalf did in LOTR. Another guy was holding his 5 foot long eyebrows. Others were just creepy, like a guy who looked like he was about to rip someone’s throat out.

We eventually left and headed back to the hotel. You’d think that after 9 hours of sleep plus a two hour nap that I wouldn’t be sleepy. Au contraire. I slept hard for another hour and a half, having some weird dream about being on a cruise line looking for my room, and after having entered the kitchen accidentally and quickly shutting the door, having somebody working in there come out and berate me for 5 minutes for doing that because apparently every now and again the cruise mafia would do that but also shoot someone when they walked it, so it was a bad trick, all the while, I duly sympathize but want to keep looking for my room because I really had to go to the bathroom. Random.

Woke up just a few minutes before 7 and we left for dinner. We had hot pot! Basically, it’s Chinese oil fondue. We had a mild side and a spicy side. I didn’t feel like the spicy side was really all that spicy (though it certainly was spicy, don’t get me wrong), but any time I ate a piece of food from it, all I would do was cough. I guess I didn’t react terribly well to it, so I just ate my mildly cooked food and stuck it in my mild sauce (kind of like ketchup, actually, so of course I liked it). Nothing too exotic was for dinner tonight, which was fine by me, but we did have beef, lamb, more fungus, some lettuce thing, fish balls, bean curd things, and some dumplings/wonton wrapped things. It was quite delightful.

After dinner, we took a cab back ot Xihu lake to walk around. This place ranks among my top 5 date places around the world. Actually, there are only 2 international places on the list so far, but hey, I’ve been to several international cities so far, so it’s up there. It was dimly lit and very romantic, with the calm water on the lake, lights from the city in the background, and plenty of benches lined along the weeping willows. We walked and talked for quite some time and then stopped at a tea house. We weren’t really hungry, but we were thirsty, so we got some nice green tea. They also brought out more lotus buds to eat the seeds, as well as cousins of lychee (sweet fruit), so we nibbled on that while we talked. Nate’s talking more and more in Chinese now that he lost his crutch when he was with his mom’s side of the family. Now, I’m feeling more and more left out. I feel like I’m getting more and more of general subject matter that people are talking about, but I still am completely lost when it comes to actually understanding. I really really won’t put myself in these shoes again or at least not try to learn more while I’m here. I know it’s a difficult language, but when there are so many people talking around you all the time, it’s got to be somewhat easier. sigh. Next time.

We eventually meandered our way back to the hotel, where I’m writing this blog. Up early tomorrow to go to breakfast (going ot a noodle house?), check out, and go to a tea museum, among other things.

Buenas noches!