'China Travel: Hangzhou' ↓

If you plan to travel to Hangzhou and from where explore some sightseeing places, there is a good place you can start - the govenment sponsored tourist service centre near Yellow Dragon Sports Centre.  

Day tours depart from the Centre every day to surrounding scenic spots, such as the water towns ZhouZhuang and Wuzhen, or the historic and cultural city Shaoxing, or the thousand-island lake. Tour price ranges from 200-300 RMB (inclusive of entrance ticket, transport fee and guidance fee).

They also organize 3-day tours to Yellow Mountain. The tour also departs every day. Price, inclusive of main entrance ticket, transport fee, guidance fee and hotel accommodation, ranges from 540-900 RMB, depending on the kind of accommodation you choose.

Be prepared that the tour groups accommodate mostly local Chinese. If you can’t speak Chinese, it is hard for you to mingle with them. But if you want to make use of the opportunity to observe the local custom or interact with the local Chinese, it may well be worth it. In particular, if you come to China to learn Chinese, it will be a good opportunity for you to practice Chinese and listen to lots of Chinese, as the tour guide will speak in Chinese only.

Also take note that the staff manning the information counter or ticket office can hardly speak English. Be prepared for a tough time if you can’t speak Mandarin.

I think the English name of the restaurant is called Chate. Well, that is the name I recall whenever I think of the restaurant anyway. In Chinese its name is literally “one tea one seat”. It has a few branches across Hangzhou, with one ideally located at the West Lake. The outdoor seating is shaded by trees, and overlooks the lake. If you look for a nice place to chill out near the West Lake, this is the one.

The restaurant has a menu of delicious drinks, including cold tea drink and ice shake. Look out for the mango ice shake - a real treat in the sweltering hot of summer.

The restaurant’s boss is taiwaness, so no wonder that the food and drink offered are quite taiwanese flavored. I must say all the food I have tried taste delicious, especially the taiwanese dish “rice with minced pork”. 

The snacks, coming in a wide variety, such as fried yam, dumplings, etc are also wonderful.

Besides West Lake, there is a branch restaurant near Dragon Sports Centre. I was once a frequent customer there, as my office was around. I had a horrible time doing business in China, and that horrible time was associated with this restaurant - whenever I was stressed, I would go out for dinner, here in this restaurant.  

To continue from my last posting about Anji bamboo forest…

Anji bamboo forest (Da Zhu Hai in Chinese) is increasingly popular among the Chinese as a destination for a taste of idyllic life in a green environment. Dozens of guesthouses with restaurants attached are being run by the local. You can play majong, a popular Chinese game, sing KTV, fish, have local farmer dishes, etc. These kinds of things appeal to Chinese, obviously, and these guesthouses fill up during the weekend, especially in summer.

The accommodation price is very cheap for international standard. Typically, a standard double room in a farmer’s house is priced at 65 yuan per night, a 3-person room at 85 and a 4-person room at 110 yuan.

If you come to the Anji bamboo forest and like the environment, just check into one of the guesthouses and spend the night there. The surroundings is peaceful and very green. And the people here are very friendly. The white tea, a local specialty, is as good as Longjing tea, the famous Chinese green tea from Hangzhou.

Some former Mandarin teachers from Zhejiang University want to give Mandarin lessons in August in Hangzhou. Please see here.

Well, I don’t know how they are going to organize it. The former teacher of Zhejiang University at the forum said it is a simple plan. Yet, they plan to teach drama, intensive Chinese, etc. It cannot be too simple a plan, right?

Hangzhou seems all of a sudden to be a popular place for learning Mandarin. Friends of mine set the trend and started Manda School of Chinese, and then comes Tefl Academy, and now the former teachers of Zhejiang University. A flurry of activities. Well, good for those wanting to learn Chinese in Hangzhou, who have more choices now.  

June to August is the time of lotus flowers. Hangzhou’s West Lake is nicely decorately with a sea of lotus flowers. The city also hosts a lotus flower festival featuring activies such as lotus dinner or lotus picking.

The bad news is, the city is unbearably hot from June through September. So be warned that you may have to see lovely flowers in the midst of sweltering hot. And don’t go to the West Lake on weekends when the lake area is swarmed with domestic tourists, especially in groups. You may not know that West Lake is among the top destinations for China’s domestic tourists.   

If there is anything you must do in Hangzhou, it has to be teahouse visit. In many of the teahouses here, interior decos are nice and there is snack buffet which you can have with the tea drinking.  You can sit back and while away your time drinking tea and having snacks for the whole afernoon or evening.

The one teahouse I often went to in Hangzhou is called “qing teng” (green rattan), at Hubin road, right next to Yuan Hua Shopping Mall and the West Lake. The location is undoubtedly convenient and excellent.

It is also the largest tea house in Hangzhou, with an area of thousands of square meters. It is elegantly decorated with water, bamboo, lamps and wood bridges. The furniture is wood and the waitress are all dressed in elegant Chinese style dress - not cheongshang, but the dress worn by Chinese women in the early 20 century.

You order a type of tea from a wide variety and a pot of hot water is always on a small stove next to your table so that you can always refill your cup of tea. The snack buffet is delicious, ranging from congee, nuts, fruit to chicken feet and fried noodle. The food comes in quality.

There are two sessions daily. 10am to 4pm is one session; 5pm to after midnight is another session. You can eat and drink as much as you want during the session and you are charged for 50 yuan (or more) only, depending on the type of tea you choose. For 50 yuan, you can choose good tea, like Longjing tea, so 50 yuan is really a bargain.  

You may not know, Hangzhou is among the richest cities in China with its property price the second highest among all China cities, only after Shanghai. Zhejiang Province, whose capital is Hangzhou, is a main production base for garments, textiles and shoes. The wealth is created mainly from exports of items like garments and shoes. Wenzhou, Ningbo and other cities around Hangzhou are where you can find many manufactuing factories and cheap labor force which works day and night to generate wealth for the new rich.

The wealth generated will then be spent in Hangzhou, where higher-end housing projects are underway on a large scale and luxury shops and restaurants are many.

The picture shown above features Hangzhou’s emerging prime business area - Yellow Dragon and the high-rise building is World Trade Centre. The banners and flags hanging in front of the center promote an up-scale housing project. This is typical. Everywhere in the city is promotion and show rooms of housing properties.

The photo above shows a residential property in Yellow Dragon. I lived there for a short period of time. The property is a good place to live in with reliable security system in place, good management and state-0f-art infrastructure. This, coupled with its prime location, means that its rent is not cheap. For a one-room apartment, the rent goes up to 3,000-4000 Yuan. A 4-room furnished apartment costs about 8,000-10,000 Yuan. Given that the monthly salary of the local residents is about 1,000-2,500 yuan, the place is no doubt not for the poor.

Having this in mind, you will understand these two photos.

Take the upper left photo first. See the up-scale residential property mentioned above? It is at the background in the photo. And see the blue shed in the front? That is the housing quarter for construcion workers who were working on an up-scale office high-rise just next to the up-scae residential property. The photo at the upper right is a close-up of the construciton workers’ housing quarters - the blue shacks.

I recalled passing by the shacks and a stale smell wafting into my senses. It was summer time. The shacks are rows of small rooms with six people crammed into one, along with bunk beds and their luggage. Workers had to bare their upper bodies and wearing shorts in the sweltering heat and humi weather. Sweat and body smell mingled with the hot air, exhuming suffocating stink. Just a little further away, lies the luxury residential housing with all modern conveniences an comforts. The worlds of the rich and poor is glaringly close, yet so painfully different.