Wednesday, June 13th-Hangzhou is pretty and flat which equals perfect

• Had to blow dry my clothes this morning
• In the true tradition of cheap travel, I’m washing my clothes by soaking them in hot water, putting some hand soap in it, and hang drying them
• This morning I ran into the problem that I had to wake up at 4:30 AM to catch my train to Hangzhou but my clothes were still kind of wet so I spent the better part of the morning trying to blow-dry my clothes
• The girls weren’t happy with my monopoly on the hair dryer but other than that I think people were ok with it (because they would do it too)
• Fun getting to Hangzhou
• So I booked a ticket for a train to leave Hangzhou from Shanghai Hongqiao at 7:30 am but I got to the station an hour early and I saw there was another train that went from Shanghai to Hangzhou at 7 AM so I thought I could try to change my ticket
• The queue was packed solid with about 50 people to a line and I waited in the back of the line for maybe 15 minutes and I moved maybe 2 feet with 60 left to go
• I said, “Screw it, I’ll try my luck”
• Luckily the two trains leaving to Hangzhou used the same platform so the same ticket gate was used to check people into both trains
• I showed the lady my ticket, went down to the bullet train that left earlier and I asked if I could switch and she didn’t even answer me, she just waved me on and I left on the earlier train in an unoccupied seat
• The trouble came later
• Turns out that I took somebody’s seat that would get on the train at a later station so I didn’t put up a fight and I left
• This happened twice because when I tried to find another seat I accidentally took the seat of someone who had just gone up to use the restroom so you can imagine the guy’s face when he returned from the bathroom and all of a sudden there was this white kid with pimples in his seat
• He didn’t have to say anything and I just waited the rest of the trip in the area between cabins to avoid fights
• Cool public bus
• The bus I took (which was a public bus) was set up as a tourist bus with an hdtv in the front and all wooden seats

• Huangzhou is absolutely gorgeous and flat 
• I rented a bike from the hostel for the entire day for 40 RMB and I just biked, biked, biked to see all the wonderful greenery around the place

• Luckily Chinese people are cool when foreigners almost run them over as the bike that the hostel loaned me somehow came without a rear brake but I did pay only 40 yuan for the whole day so I wasn’t as angry as the poor woman I almost took out 

•  Make sure you accidentally don’t get the girl bike
• I just picked the black bike because black is my favorite color but when I looked at it more closely after I had rode for maybe 5 miles I noticed that what I thought were circular saws were actually flowers

• Loved the Chinese Silk and China Tea museums
• The inner engineer in me liked the silk museum because they showed how it was made starting from the worm all the way to the finished product and they even had staff members playing around with some of the equipment (I don’t know if they were doing something official but they did get to play with the cool machines and I was quite jealous)

Mulberry farm in the museum to show the type of trees that silk worms grow on

• The China National Tea museum took my heart away solely due to the free private tea tasting they did for me with green, black, jasmine, and oolong tea
• They actually have a tea farm on the museum grounds where they get their tea from, how legit is that? 

Tea farm on the grounds of the China Tea Museum

Tea Grounding Machine

This 5 ft. symbol was actually made of tea leaves

All the free tea I got to enjoy in a free private tasting

Jasmine tea before the flower blooms in the pan

The Jasmine flower actually bloomed inside the pot as we waited. How cool is that!

• On a related note, I think Chinese little children are absolutely adorable except when they’re crying (which makes me like every human being on the planet)
• I saw this little girl having a little hissy fit and boy oh boy she could break glass with the way she was screaming
• I think that Chinese kids are special though in that when they cry, they REALLY cry because it’s like waterfalls coming down from their eyes whereas western kids get that one single drop down the side of their cheek
• Leifeng Pagoda and Jingci Temple
• If there’s one thing I like about Christianity it’s that we don’t make people pay a cover charge to see our churches
• Buddhist temples are cool, but why do they keep charging me cover charges to get in the gate? 
• It's not like this is the latest and hippest club where there's hot girls dancing in monk robes 

• I really liked these temples
• At Jingci temple we were specifically told that we shouldn’t take pictures but when I saw some Chinese girls take pictures I thought, “Well if this how the Chinese treat their monuments then this is how I will treat them”

• All the signs were in English but just this one in Leifeng temple was a little difficult to read because the shadows of the letters got in the way of actually reading the sign

•  Other than that, Leifeng Temple was really cool and it provided great views of the lake (definitely worth the 40 RMB)

• Su and Bai Causeway
• There’s these long roads with water on both sides of them that you can bike up and down and I highly recommend anyone who goes to Hangzhou to bike up and down those because I did it 5 times and I would do it 5 more if I had the time
• And if you really want that “natural” feeling then do it in the mid-afternoon where you can get pelted by pollen spores that get caught in your hair and you can say, “aaaah, nature”

• Got some Chinese Propaganda Postcards
• I’m still kicking myself for being cheap when I was in northeastern China and Hohhot for not getting postcards so now I’m starting to look for some and I found these great ones
• I think the, "We must liberate Taiwan" is my favorite