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| Just look at that clear, blue water! |
This past weekend, I accompanied a few of my American classmates and their Chinese roommates to Wuzhen for our partially-reimbursed “small group travel” experience. Wuzhen, a reconstructed historic canal city in Zhejiang province, is about 20 minutes + bus ride away from Hangzhou by high-speed train and two hours away by long-distance bus. It was quite the China adventure!
Getting to Wuzhen required a “30 minute” stretch of public transportation that turned into 1.15 hours with traffic and bus stops- because of this, we missed our train and needed to re-purchase our train tickets for a train one hour later. The train ride was less than 30 mins, which brought us to a local bus stop. There, we piled into a tiny short public bus to take us to Wuzhen, on which perhaps fifteen to twenty Chinese people were standing in the aisle for upwards of an hour! Eventually, we finally arrived at our lovely Wisteria Hostel within the Beautiful Scenery Zone.
Wisteria Hostel’s beds consisted of bunks, with wood planks spanning across the frame, and a thin blanket passing for a mattress on top. Sheets and a comforter were provided at the foot of the bed. The three American students shared our six-bunk room with three random Chinese girls from other parts of Zhejiang province. The hall restroom featured a row of squat toilets with no toilet paper and bad plumbing, and the showers were pretty terrifying. Still, though, the hostel was in a convenient location within the Scenic Zone, and the Chinese roommates were so thrilled to be there.
The pretty Wuzhen area was very touristy and was sort of reminiscent of Disney world. Apparently there was originally a real city in Wuzhen centuries ago, but the government came in within the past couple of years and completely consumerized and reconstructed the place. Now, tourist traps and silly museums abound. My personal favorite of these museums was probably the Ancient Bed museum, closely followed by a collection of coins from around the world. Not sure what these things have to do with Zhejiang history or even Wuzhen, but Chinese tourists love it and arrive by the hundreds to check it out.
Despite the lack of authenticity, Wuzhen’s scenery was really beautiful, and I took plenty of pictures of the completely re-built buildings, canals, and pagodas. I wasn’t the only one taking pictures. The hoards of Chinese tourists were particularly fascinated by my blonde hair, and came at me with or without asking permission to take picture after picture of the blonde Lao Wai (foreigner). Maybe the weirdest one was a fellow on a public bus on the way back to Hangzhou, who literally had his video camera out filming the backs of my and my friend Eleanor’s heads- for an hour. I asked him, in Chinese, what the heck he thought he was doing- to which he merely gave me a startled expression and resumed his filming.
But even more crazy was our return travel arrangement. It was Saturday night, and we had all settled down at the Lotus Lounge bar to enjoy a tasty Western desert and one overpriced cocktail each. Around 10 pm or so, one of my friends casually asked the Chinese roommates: “what time are we leaving Wuzhen in the morning?” The unexpected reply: “what time do you want to leave?” We were shocked- the thought of booking a return ticket had not even crossed these Chinese college students’ minds. “We were thinking maybe after dinner,” one of them pointed out, looking up from her knock-off Angry Birds cell phone game. We expressed our desire to leave earlier due to lots of homework, and the roommates again were shocked. After rounds of chatter and Internet browsing on one roommate’s iPad, we finally came to the consensus that we would leave the Scenic Zone around 8:00 am, catch a bus to the WuZhen Bus Station, and hopefully find a cheap long-distance bus to bring us back to Hangzhou. If that didn’t work out, we would take another bus to the Wuzhen Train Station and try to book a train. It seemed insane at the time, but surprisingly enough Sunday morning we were able to squeeze onto an 8:45 am bus to Hangzhou that landed us “home” around 10:10 am. We were actually back in our dorm in time for lunch, and once again, we foreigners were the crazy and confused ones- the Chinese people know much better how their system works.
Did you know that when you purchase a long-distance bus ticket in China, the one yuan ($0.15) “service tax” added on top of the price tag actually covers a life insurance policy? No joke. In case of a devastating crash, fiery explosion, lightening strike or other disaster (heaven forbid) that might harm our lovely bus, my family would supposedly be reimbursed up to 50,000 RMB, approximately $7,800, for my loss of life. Good to know I’m worth so much to the Chinese government!
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| 乌镇美不美？Is Wuzhen pretty? Question used to make everyone smile for the camera :) |
On a spicier note, cooking class last week produced a beautiful, spicy, fragrant rendition of the classic chicken-and-peanut stir-fry that you can find at Big Bowl: Kung Pow Chicken! It tasted so much better under the guidance of our funny, short-haired and fussy Chinese cooking teacher than at any American “Chinese” restaurant. I’m feeling so intense in my cooking skills at this point J It’s a specialty of Sichuan province in central China, and I’ll actually be visiting Chengdu in Sichuan over spring break. Chengdu, just so you know, is home to spicy food and PANDAS. It’s going to be an awesome trip- and we've actually ALREADY booked the return tickets!
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| Kung Pow Chicken (宫保鸡丁） |
The secret to making the peanuts extra-crunchy is to boil them in oil and then allow them to cool to below room temperature prior to cooking. Who knew? For this purpose, our cooking teacher put the just-boiled peanuts in a plate on the open window ledge, since the outside temperature at the time was hovering in the low 40s.
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