trying to get back on the wagon

I'm totally ready to try this whole blogging thing again.

Right now, I'm feeling pretty good. I went on a lovely weekend trip (which I will discuss in a bit), bought some clothes (it's just so...cathartic), and relaxed. School this week is totally laid back, and Mike comes next week. I've got about a million things to do before he gets here, and I get the feeling the time is going to go by pretty quickly.

Let me back up. On Friday, Shannon, Dania, Dania's friend from home (Graeme), Dee, Sanami, and I took the train to Hangzhou. The train seats were surprisingly comfortable (MUCH better than every train seat i sat on in Europe) and the trip only took about an hour and a half. The bathrooms looked sub-par, but that was to be expected and thank god i didn't need to use them. Squat toilets on a moving train...so not my thing.

We found our hostel, which was also surprisingly nice and clean. It was about 89 kuai per person per night (11 dollars) for the double rooms, and since there were 6 of us, that worked out nicely. The only complaint i have about the hostel was the fact that we couldn't figure out how to turn on the hot water. Therefore, I took one miserable shower and decided to stay dirty on Sunday.

Friday night was pretty low-key. We ate at a Thai/Cambodian restaurant that was pretty good and had a nice atmosphere. I really don't know what I'm going to do when I come home to the states and have to pay more than $10 a plate for restaurants like that. The whole "cheap food" in China is REALLY easy to get used to. After dinner we went to some random German bar and enjoyed the live entertainment. Ok, enjoyed is a strong word. Tolerated is perhaps a better choice. It was a 'band' of 3 philipinos, 2 girls singing and one guy on a keyboard. It was sort of like glorified karaoke. And they took requests. That is neat.

Saturday was a really nice tourist day that we spent on the lake. We took one of these touristy boats to a couple of islands on the lake (it's really pretty huge) and just sort of wandered around. Here are some more pictures that I took on those islands:
Basically, Hangzhou is a really beautiful place. That afternoon, we went to a temple and then sat down on a dock and watched the sun set over the lake:

Sunday involved a bit of a late start, hamburgers, and a trip to the Buddha caves. These were actually really really cool and I'm sad that we didn't have more time to spend there. Here are some pictures from that excusion:

From the Buddha caves, we pretty much just took a cab back to the hostel and then another cab to the bus station. That's right, I said bus. Apparently all of the trains were booked for Sunday night, so we ended up getting bus tickets instead.

Now, I was quoted to have said "I pretty much never really feel like i'm in 'China.'" That might sound like a strange statement to make, but think about it this way: I speak English all day long, am surrounded by Americans, live in a comfortable apartment, make a good salary to spend on things, and try to eat other types of food (besides Chinese) for dinner most nights (although I do have chinese food in the cafeteria every day for lunch). I go out for Starbucks coffee a lot (non-fat lattes are currently my drink of choice) and spend a lot of time on the internet. Granted, my internet is censored (come on, Google? Seriously?) and sometimes it's a struggle to get the Shanghainese cab driver to understand where we want to go...but really, I'm living a rather comfortable western lifestyle here in Shanghai. Even at most of the tourist destinations, everything has been Disneyland-ed. The Chinese remodel and redo and rebuild every 'historic' site all the time. So most of the temples, etc don't even feel old-- mostly because they aren't. They were 'redone' in 1998. My friend Dee even said that one time he visited some 'famous historical lake" and when he got there, they hadn't finished building it yet. Seriously. This leads me to feel like i'm not even really in China at all, but some surreal recreation of it.

Now...all that was pretty much thrown out the window when we got to the bus station. Shanghai Nan zhan (South Station) is the train station we left Shanghai from, and is immaculate and nicer than the airport. I would equate it to the new Northwestern terminal at Detroit Metro, but with cooler architecture and fewer stores. That was not the case with Hangzhou Dong Zhan (East Station). There, it felt like "china." Everyone was yelling at us "Shanghai! Shanghai!" (although in their interesting accent, it was more "Sanghai, sanghai!") to try to get us to buy tickets back to shanghai from them. I was intensely motion sick from the cab ride (unfortunately, that little problem has not resolved itself as i tend to get quite nauseated during a lot of cab rides) and when Dania told us that the bathroom was "worse than the worst bathroom i've ever seen," i almost laughed because it didn't seem possible. Well, as my stomach was already a mess, i walked into the bathroom and walked right out, trying really hard not to gag. She was right. The smell....oh China. If you have a particularly hard time with bad odors, please don't bother coming to visit me.

Surprisingly enough, the bus ride was great and totally painless. It only lasted about 2 hours and took us back to Shanghai Nan Zhan, which is very close to home. Shannon mentioned that one of the best parts about taking a trip is the good feeling you get when you come home. It's weird for me to think of 'home' as my tiny apartment here in Shanghai, but she was right. It was a good trip, but it felt good to get back.