China Day 21: Hangzhou (杭州)!

For our one free weekend in Shanghai, thanks again to our kind Professor who moved our class excursion to a weekday, a few of us decided to go to Hangzhou for a day! :)

We had to wake up pretty early, and given that some of us had gone karaoking the night before, I was super tired and knocked out on the subway ride to the train station haha. Also, the train tickets were really cheap! Round trip ticket was less than $20 USD and they was second-class seats on the super nice high speed train. Loved it!

We mostly spent our day at West Lake (西湖) and it was so huge that we couldn't walk around the entire thing, but that was okay. It was so gorgeous. Even though it was a rainy day, the cloudy day made everything misty and surreal, like those Chinese landscape paintings.

Beautiful!! 

Again, just to prove I was actually there. :)

Justin said this was where people committed suicide. T_T I hope he was joking. 

I love bridges!

Haha "pleasure boats"

Natural wildlife!

I thought it looked like a dinosaur. :)

The walkway had very cool designs on the ground.

Dragon ( 龍) and Phoenix (鳳)

(龍井茶) Dragon Well Tea- trademark of Hangzhou!

(三潭印月) Three Pools Mirroring the Moon- three stone miniature pagodas that are  apparently a great place for moon viewing!!

Justin and Jules with the pagoda! 

If you look closely you can see our boat driver ducking in the back. x_x

(三潭印月) The pagodas are on the one yuan bill in China!

The ducks swam away because we had no food for them. :(

(雷鋒塔) Leifeng Pagoda

Pearls were also a specialty of Hangzhou!

More photos of Leifeng Pagoda :)

(淨慈寺) Jing Ci Monastery

I think this was a hotel? But it was pretty!

A giant golden dragon boat! Random, but awesome. :)

(苏提) Su Causeway. Also, notice the horde of people with umbrellas!

(花港關魚) Red Carp Pond. That blob of red was where the fish were sleeping. 

(曲院風荷) Quyuan Garden- We almost didn't go, but this was probably my favorite stop around West Lake, so I'm so glad we ended up going!! 

On a bridge! 

We went to this restaurant called Grandma's Kitchen in Kat's guidebook for dinner. The food was very good but we were worried we were going to miss our train (well, I was worried, and probably overly so), so that made the meal less pleasant for me. Boo. I need to chillax more. Regardless, yay food! (I don't know what any of it was officially called because Justin ordered everything. Sorry for no captions!)

And thus concluded our adventures in Hangzhou. :)