Wonder of the West Lake (Xi hú) (10.9.2009)

It was a noticeable improvement to the air quality compared to the previous cities when arriving to Hangzhou. Hangzhou is a city of maybe one million inhabitants, and even though there seemed to be lots of this fog in the distance (smog?), the air was less stuffy as in Shanghai. Hot it was still, don't know how much but sweating occured big time.

It feels as if every time nowadays I go even for a short walk, legs start immediately aching. This happened also yesterday when we were strolling in the south-east corner of the West Lake. There were lots of pavillions and boats both coming and going from the several piers of the shores to the islands in the middle of the lake.

Also, I think a major scam was about to happen to us for the first time in China: this handicapped person from waist down came to talk to us with his three-wheeled scooter about Nokia and whatnot. Then I (to my misfortune) asked him about the local Longjiang (or something like that) tea and if he knew where we could get it for cheap. The guy said he knew and started yapping some prices for us, which we thought to be expensive, but I remember having read something about such amounts, so I did not get suspicious. Well, we thought why not, after all it is a local specialty and the guy otherwise seemed to have a good sense of humour and stories of all kinds. When we got to the tea place, the price was 25 kuai for one cup. We thought this might be too expensive for the both of us to take, so we decided to share one cup. The handicapped guy was translating the teahouse manager's speech and said that we had to take two cups. OK, so... well allright, let's take two cups, it's only a once in a lifetime thing. The next thing the manager came up with was that we had to pay all in advance. At that point my inner alarm bells sprung off to the fullest extent. I said no thank you, we are leaving now, rose up quickly and walked away from the scene. The snake tried to scam us big time.. I was upset some time but got over it. Had we seen the scooter-guy once more I don't know what would have happened. Probably nothing :).

On the same night we depraved ourselves of our Chinese McDonalds virginity. 2.5 euro for the most expensive meal (quite small actually), so compared to the price was OK, but otherwise did not fill up my westerner's expectations. I have to say also in this part that on the next day we went to KFC just for the fun of it. It was total crap.

In our hostel was this nice Chinese student guy, who was also travelling. It was fun to learn that in China there is also a surname that resembles to mine: Lehtinen in English is something like Leaflet, and in China it's Ye. So, thus far I might be called Johnny Ye. Not bad actually! :) Sounds like some American-Chinese videogame programmer name. AnywaIy, I was talking with the guy about the Chinese government. My conclusions were that the Chinese people do not care that much about the government and their way of doing things, because everything works just fine as they are. I have to agree that there has not been any friction between me and the authorities here in China. I pointed out that the Chinese freedom of speech and press transparence is not in the best shape in China. He agreed, and said he always reads the foreign newspapers also on the Internet. It was fun to learn that also the western media manipulates stuff: the guy said he had noticed that sometimes the western media stories are the complete opposite than they should be (of which he knows how they should be) or some part of the story is manipulated. That might be so.. I started to think maybe the western media is trying to make us westerners think of China as this non-free country, where one has to fear for his life. Who knows who is pulling the western media's strings in the background and what are its intentions. I put it this way to the Chinese guy and I also think this way: corruption can be either visible or non-visible. In China, it is usually visible. This form of corruption is not that dangerous if some next-to-nobody policeman takes some bribes. The hidden corruption is what is dangerous; it is what is probably practiced in every western "modern" government or some sort of power structure. These corrupted people wear smart suits and make decisions, which affect whole nations, even the whole world. And these are the people who have the final say in everything that happens. This is a scary thought. Maybe China, in its own way, is actually very free country indeed. Free of the power-having scum? Well, hard to say at least. Every country has its unique faults.

This day we went around the whole friggin' lake (the lake is quite big so it took a moment and another) and climbed up to this Leifeng Pagoda, which was at a quite high spot. You could see the whole lake and probably Hangzhou from up there, the views were very "niché". Finally, we took a boat to one of the lake's artificial islands, which was a nice pastime after the agonizing walk around the lake.

Tonight we splurged our splurgeness all over Hangzhou. In layman's terms, we went to a Japanese restaurant called Teppanyaki. We had read it would cost 168 kuai for a meal with no limits and one could have beer and sake as much as one would like. You guessed it yeah, there was no such deal. The cheapest thing in the menu was 180 kuai, so we took that (20 euros or so). OK, so there was this battalion of waitresses eagerly serving us and following every single move we made. The best of the best was that we had our personal chef, who cooked right in front of us by using the metallic table as a stove (or wok?). The dinner consisted of maybe 5 or 6 different portions: salad, soup, pre-main-course (cod), main course (chicken and steak) and the dessert (ice-cream, roasted banana plus some fruits). The amount of tea was unbounded, and every time my elbow would rise too high when having a sip, the waitress ran to me to serve me another cup. OK, so the total price rose up to 448 kuai (with one beer included), which is like 47 euros or alike. And there were actually 2000 kuai meals there also... So fortunately we took the cheapest.

Hangzhou was nice city, because it was less hectic than Shanghai or Beijing. We Finnish like this. What we don't like is that everybody's staring at us for 30 seconds at least and not even having common courtesy to try to hide it. Everybody also wants to take a photo with us for some reason.. Maybe we are so peculiar-looking to them. This morning in a restaurant some Chinese couple was laughing to the way we were eating with our chopsticks and staring harshly us.. So I always try to look as if though I was a common person just trying to survive my daily routines, but it becomes impossible when you feel eyes everywhere on you..maybe it's the Finnish shyness gene? From now on, if I become irritated I start photographing also the one who photograph me. See how it feels like to be a zoo animal in your own land, ha!

Tomorrow it's time to leave for our last "packet" of this tournee, namely the Huang Shan. We are probably going to bunk at a hostel in the Tunxi district (Huang Shan city downtown, it's all very confusing the naming), which is an hour drive away from the famous mountains of Huang Shan. There our feet will probably literally kill us when rising to the near 2 kilometer mountain tops. In exchange there' going to be some mighty fine scenes to be photographed!