Hangzhou Trip

I may get a few more pictures on later, but this is a good start. Tim even helped write this one a bit (you will notice he definitely helped on the pics as they are in the right order and not sideways). Thanks hun!

Quick side note...I love ice!!! I have always loved a good ice water, but I forgot how much I really love it. You see here in China not only do they not use ice, but they actually prefer their water warm. So I have just become somewhat accustomed to have warm water, I don't like it, but it is all that they have. Anyways, I finally found some ice cube trays and just finished the best glass of ice water ever!!! Just needed to say that.

So Hangzhou....we decided to only go to Hangzhou as the mountains were supposed to have lots of rain. So we left Tuesday morning and headed to the Shanghai train station. First of all the train station was amazing, it must be fairly new. We found the ticket counter, only to be told that the train we showed up for was already sold out. The next one didn't leave for 2 ½ hours, so we bought the tickets and found a place to eat lunch.

The girls played and then Adayla needed to go to the bathroom. We are thinking "couldn't be that bad" as this facility seemed very nice.

Tim took some pictures, I don't need to say anything else. I will let you know that people don't flush toilet paper and this is the men's bathroom......

Anyways, we loaded the train that was quite nice and headed towards Hangzhou. The fast train is only 1 ½ hours direct. We can handle anything for 1 ½ hours.
Hangzhou is a “small” Chinese city of “only” 2.5 million people (it would be tied for third largest in the U.S. with Chicago). Hangzhou is known for its beautiful scenery (lake, trees, mountains, etc) and beautiful women! Hangzhou served as the capital city of the Song Dynasty during the 12th and 13th centuries, when the emperors ordered that China's most beautiful women be brought to Hangzhou – centuries later those genes are still in the city! When Marco Polo visited Hangzhou during the 13th century, he remarked that “Hangzhou is the most splendid city in the world.”

We arrived and took a taxi to our friends house. After the train unloads there is a mad rush towards the taxi line. Have any of you read about the Beijing people having to practice waiting in line for the olympics?? There is a reason they have to do this and it makes us crazy. But it is just their way of life and they don't get mad at others for doing it. All I can say that our strollers are coming in very handy in “knocking” people back into their place. We put the girls down for their afternoon nap and then headed to the most famous part of Hangzhou, West Lake.

The only not as fun part is that there are lots of Chinese tourists there and therefore we become an attraction, again.

We headed back to our friends house. These are the same friends that stayed with us a few weeks ago, the ones that got sick at our house. Then our other Olmsted friends came and we got sick. Then we go to our friends house and I get sick again. We are seeing a pattern, every time with get together with fellow Olmsteders somebody is sick. So I have solved this....we just won't be hanging out with them anymore! Really they were great hosts and we enjoyed staying at their beautiful home. Adayla and Tally loved playing with their kids and their toys.

The next morning we walked around a different part of the lake and took a boat tour on a hand crafted wood boat.

The tour guide rows you around the entire lake. Quite different views than we had seen before. Thankfully it was a bit overcast and so it wasn't as hot as it was the next day. Tally loved the boat, she just wanted to only hang out the side. Her parents thought this wasn't a good idea and so she screamed for a good 20 minutes until we got off the boat. The tour was round trip with a stop at little store for shopping, we happily declined the return trip and continued around the lake.

This was early on in the trip, we have pics of Tally's grumpy moment, but we will keep that to ourselves.

This is not a pic of the big pagoda, just a cute one of Tim and Adayla.

Eventually we came to a big Pagoda right on the lake. We were able to go all the way to the top (it had recently been reconstructed and they added some elevators!) The top had amazing views of the lake, we loved this peaceful place.

What to you think of the two individual strollers? We decided to buy another single because the double jogger is just too big to fit in the taxis and so we can't take it out of town. This works and we don't have to carry one kid half the day. Now they only fight about who gets to sit in the new stroller.

Tally and her mom at the top of the pagoda.

We returned back to our friends for the afternoon nap and the guys took the kids swimming to give the moms a break. We enjoyed it while I “helped” fix dinner. She is Russian and we had some tasty Bierocks! It is good to get together with other scholars to compare notes and get some ideas off them. So we had quite a bit to chat about.

My friend took me shopping that evening and took me to where I could buy a cake for Morgan's birthday! There were no birthday cakes, per se, so I bought the next best thing – a cheese cake. It was a beauty. We brought it back and surprised Morgan with it. We sang “Zhu ni sheng ri kuai le” and Morgan blew out the candles with the girls' help. Like so many desserts in China, it looked so good, but they forgot to add the sugar! It was good, but was much better the next evening when we thought of putting Nutella on the cheesecake – Mmmm! That was Morgan's first of THREE birthdays here in China as this fantasy assignment comes to an end in September of 2009.

The next morning we headed to an ancient Buddhist Temple. The grounds were again amazing. And the inside was interesting to say the very least....

Tally and Adayla outside the temple taking a rest off their feet from all the walking....

Tally at this point had this monster mosquito bite on her face that made 1/2 of her face compeletly swell. She looks quite normal in these pics, but ahh, it was kind of scary.

Tim goes to buy the tickets to the temple and he comes out to a gathering crowd....

He knows where to find us.............

I think the best part of it all was at the end we found the closest thing to snow cones in China. It was crushed ice with a strawberry flavoring on the top. Usually you can find all sorts of food and deserts that look absolutely fantastic and then you taste it. As Tim noted above, the Chinese forget to add sugar to almost everything, but this was sweet, cold, and very refreshing.

We then headed back for another quick nap for the girls (see how our lives revolve around the naps), but that is just our life. We packed up, thanked our friends, and headed for the train station. We arrived with about 30 minutes to spare. We lugged all our stuff up the stairs and showed our tickets to some folks to find out where we needed to go. They started laughing at us. We had gone to the wrong train station. The other one was far away and there was no chance of making it. We would have arrived in Shanghai at 8 pm and decided that the later train was not an option. We called our friends to say we would be heading back to their place for the night. This is what we will now refer to as the Hangzhou curse. We are not as cursed as them or we would have made at least one visit to the emergency room. Tally's big mosquito bite that swelled half of her entire face was just her body reacting to the bite and after two days her face returned to normal. What the heck, we enjoyed another night with them. We made it back on the 11 am train and arrived home just in time for afternoon naps, this time for the entire family. Tim was also still able to squeeze in his now weekly massage.

Saturday morning we had Chinese class and Tim had Jane help him translate the information on his weekend get away. He will be joining his classmates this upcoming weekend for some get to know you and team building exercises. I will let him tell how it went next week. The rest of the day was quite lazy, we didn't even go outside. The girls were happy to be home and playing with their toys. We woke up and went to church today. A few exciting things happened. First, a Japanese family sang a beautiful song in Japanese that brought such a peaceful feeling with it. This family faithfully attends each week, though only the father speaks English. They are a great example to the rest of us. The second was that Tim and I found out we would be teaching the 3 years olds. They will be quite a handful, but I think we will like it. Lastly, another family just moved into our complex!! They have a 3 year old boy and one due in November. We are very excited! There are mostly Chinese in our complex and quite a few Germans. It will be nice for Adayla and Tally to have an English speaking padre (and nice for their mom too!)

That catches us up, we are off to bed!