Christmas Travels Numero Nueve - Hangzhou

We wanted to spend the day seeing Hangzhou, but first we had business to attend to. It was December 30th. While I was still lazing about in bed, Liam went down to the hostel front desk and asked if they could help us book flights home. He came back and said there were two options: today, the 30th, which cost 2100 kuai, or the 31st, which cost only 1600. The 30th would have been ideal in terms of getting back in time for New Year's Eve celebrations, but didn't give us much time to see all that we wanted in Hangzhou. And at such a steep price! We settled on the tickets on the 31st, and asked them to book them for us. We had to go to a bank to get cash. The hostels book the flights for us and then go somewhere with our cash to pay for it later. Off we toddle to the cashpoint. The problem here was that Liam had lost his credit card, and his spare had very little money on it. So he borrowed the cash off me and we went back to pay. There was a queue at the front desk so we checked the arrival time on the internet, and it was 22.20. It was on discovering that that I freaked out a bit; bearing the delays in mind from our outbound journey, and being fairly used to the Chinese lack of organisation and punctuality, I thought it was far too risky to wait until the 31st. So we asked for the flights to be changed to the day earlier, but the airline apparently wouldn't allow for this. So it had to be New Year's Eve. Liam was not too happy about my negativity, but actually I think that though I was going on about it a bit too much, it wasn't pessimism, but realism!
We went for lunch and had a lovely dinner of pigeon (inexplicably served with popcorn), stone-grilled chicken skewers and spring roll type things. Very nummy. But lots of bird bones by the end of it! Then we went to find a Bank of China so Liam could change some old traveller's cheques that he had with him just in case. That meant he could pay back some of what he owed me and also have some money for the last couple of days in Hangzhou. We finally found the bank and waited quite a while for the money to be handed over. After that, we really didn't know what to do in Hangzhou, but I had vague memories of reading about a shopping street where you could buy traditional Hangzhouvian (yeah I made that word up) handicraft. We didn't know where it was though, so we walked to a large crossroads and tried to flag taxis. They were all taken! The ones that weren't ignored us anyway, and every other person trying to flag them too. Finally one guy stopped, but wouldn't take us as he was under contract to take people to a certain place or something. After an hour or so, we gave up and walked back to the hostel. We thought we could find bus routes or something. No luck. So off out again to try our luck with the taxis of Hangzhou. Eventually we got one, despite stiff competition from every other citizen of Hangzhou who were also clearly annoyed about the lack of taxis in their city, and very victoriously asked for our destination. Turned out it was literally round the corner from the crossroads we'd originally been at! The taxi driver that had stopped could at least have told us! The street was completely rubbish anyway, there were only seriously pricey antique shops and nothing I could stretch to as a mere souvenir as opposed to a lifetime investment!
We had originally turned down the same-day tickets because of the price (sensible) and because we thought we had tourism to do! But by this point we were at a total loss! We made our way towards the lake, which is the central focus of Hangzhou, and also near our hostel. After a quick detour to Starbucks (it happens to the best of us) we got to the lakeside. A crowd of people had gathered and we heard an announcement saying the show would start in 5 minutes. We had no idea what show so we stuck around and five minutes later there was a fountain display. It was actually really pretty with coloured lights and different water jets timed to some Romeo and Juliet music. Plus the background of the still lake and the twinkly lights on the hills in the distance made for a very nice vista. And when it was done, it was beddybyes time!



The fountains.