Hangzhou

HANGZHOU, CHINA--July 8, 2014--In case those of you out there who are following our Asian escapades think that my wife and I are off on a non-stop adventure, I just want you to know that our lives still have more than a modicum of the daily grind. Our lives are still full of the normal administrative tasks to which we all must attend. Bus Passes For instance, on our return from our travels through Vietnam and ... Read More

It’s better to miss a train by an hour than by two minutes. On our return trip from Hong Kong we missed the train from Shanghai to Hangzhou by two crummy minutes. The level of frustration in missing a train is inversely proportional to the amount of time by which it is missed: miss it by an hour and you will shrug your shoulders; miss it by two minutes and you will summon every word of street language and invective and ... Read More

Joe and Char board the 25, the first step to embarking on The Mother Of All Bus Rides, aka, The Bus Ride From Hell. Our bus experience on a recent Saturday in Hangzhou, China, clearly sets it apart from all other experiences of the week and lands it squarely in the I-can’t-believe-I-lived-through-that category. In thinking back on it, I’m a little undecided whether to call it “The Bus Ride From Hell,” or, “The Mother ... Read More

This is a rather long and somewhat uninteresting review of our week written to give you some idea of what life is like in Hangzhou. Just like your lives, much of what we do is routine and every so often something different or fun comes along. --jk  Sometime during the night on Monday I awoke to make what has become for some number of years now the nightly trip to the bathroom. I noticed that my ankle was sore, as ... Read More

Our first week in Hangzhou found us reestablishing our life in a much different way than we are accustomed to living in Minnesota. We met with some old friends, did some basic grocery shopping, signed up with a Chinese telecom provider for Chinese phones, took a tour to the nearby canal town of Wuzhen, enjoyed three wonderful Chinese dining experiences, and quickly remembered how to cross a Hangzhou intersection without ... Read More

During our Sunday walk around West Lake, we got a text from our student-interpreter (also our new Chinese granddaughter), Eryi (are-ee'), asking when we were leaving.  She wanted to visit one more time.  So we met her at Pacific Coffee this morning and chatted for a couple of hours--about school, about going off to college, about China and the United States and the difference in our populations and cultures. ... Read More

After five months in China, we realize that there are so many things that we HAVE NOT done.  We haven't used the well-developed bike rental system, we haven't gone to the Lei Feng Pagoda, we didn't get to the Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an, didn't make it to Beijing, the Yellow Mountain, the kilns in Ningbo, Tibet, and other places and sites. We have been promising ourselves that we would walk around West Lake, ... Read More

A Last Lunch Menu at Monday's lunch with Lindan and William (whom we met during the Marryin' Joseph episode--go look at the pics again): Duck eggs with soy sauceCrab--three whole animalsTofu with meat fillingTea mushroomsWest Lake beef soupSpicy frogSome kind of whole crustacean, not shrimp, not lobster--something in betweenShrimp dumplingsPeanut ice cream Lindan is our Chinese daughter and we wanted to ... Read More

Eudora Station is one of the latest restaurant discoveries for us.  Although it is located right smack-dab in the middle of the tourist area of Hangzhou, we didn't discover it until Sunday, June 10, nearly five months after our arrival.  I guess that is an indication that we do not hang out much in the tourist places.  Nevertheless, Eurdora Station was fun to discover.  It has a nice combination of ... Read More

Today ended four days of lunches, dinners, and outings with some of our Chinese friends. It's a kind of last mad rush to get in those experiences we've been meaning to get to, but, for some reason, haven't had the opportunity to do. Seems odd in a way. When you stay in a place for five months, you would think a person would have ample time to see a country, even a country like China. And it probably would be enough time ... Read More