I forgot to mention in my previous post that my camera died halfway through the bike ride. Apparently I should have charged it more. So I missed out on some good pictures, like albino peacocks. And possibly the tower ruins, and the greatest archaeological find too! I did get it charged in time for the tea house though.
In any case, my story left off with us coming back from a day of biking and shopping. We decided to treat ourselves to Lo Wei Lo for supper, a fancy place in the middle of the west lake strip. It's a government run restaurant, and it's really popular. We go there at 7:30 (I think, I can't remember if it was 7:30 or 7, but I'll make all times relative to 7:30). We didn't have a reservation, so we walked in. We went upstairs because there was a mob downstairs, and then when we got upstairs the lady told us that we needed a number from downstairs to get a table. George says some guy told him there was a hundred people ahead of him. So we go downstairs and get a number. I tell George to ask how much it would cost to get a table right away. But apparently you can't bribe this restaurant because you'd have to bribe all the employees, since it's a government restaurant, the employees don't care how much money the restaurant makes. Basically if we only bribed one person, everyone else would get mad.
So we decide we'll take a walk along the lake in order to kill some time. George asked the lady how long till we get seated but she didn't know. So George said it would be more than an hour. As we took a walk, I started asking things like "What happens if they call our number and we're not there?" and "How did the guy know there was a hundred people before him" etc, etc. Mostly because it seemed fishy to me for some reason. Trish would say it's another of my conspiracy theories. Anyways, as we're killing time, George answers one of my questions, apparently they were serving #70 when we left and our number was #86... ok that's a huge restaurant. 16 tables before us, that's like 10 minutes! We've been gone 40 mins. So I tell em we should head back. We get there and they're serving #120 or something. The place is almost empty except for people sitting down, almost nobody is waiting to be seated. George presents our number and the lady lets out a pretty loud "Huh?" as in, "Where have you been, we called that 30 minutes ago" In any case, George talks her into letting us sit before everyone else, so we get a table right away.
The waitress comes along, we order some stuff... Chicken with no sex, as in virgin chicken, as in young chicken. We get some eel, and some fish ball soup. The waitress tells us that we'll starve, we need to order more. So we order a couple more dishes, sweet and sour style fish and some donborro or something like that. Basically a cube of fatty pork. The chicken was great, the fish balls were amazing. They were soft and fluffy and tasted like good fish. Not like the rubbery crap you get in the US. Anyways, as we're eating the waitresses keep coming by and asking if we got all our dishes. They're already rushing to get us out of the restaurant and we haven't even gotten our food. Apparently it's time for them to close and they want us to get out of there pronto. So we finally get all our food and we eat, take our time, relax. They bring us the bill really early, it's pretty much the first time I get the bill without asking for it in China. All this time, whenever someone else gets up from their table and they're done eating, all the waiters and waitresses converge on the table. They strip in clean and fold it up, the patio tables are made to fold up kinda like cafeteria tables. Then they stack the chairs and haul them off into a room. By the end of our meal we're one of only three tables left, and the waitresses have stopped asking if we need anything, and are basically avoiding us. We had already paid, so I guess they didn't care about us anymore. I couldn't even get a napkin, even though we asked twice. So I wiped my hands clean on their fancy table cloth.
We left the restaurant and grabbed a cab. The cabby tells us that it would take him an hour to drive us to our hotel but it's only a 25 minute walk. So we get out of the cab and start walking. There's a path along a road where cars can't drive and that's what we take. We try to rent bikes to get there, but the machines are turned off for the night, so we can't take bikes out anymore. We walk the rest of the way there, it was a pretty relaxing stroll compared to what we had done earlier that day. We hopped on a taxi after we finished the no car shortcut and took a 5 minute ride back to the hotel.
Sleep was bad. It was so hot in the hotel, it had been 35 degrees out the whole day and it didn't really cool off at night. I woke up sweating a few times, took a shower to cool off.
Sunday started off a little early, 8am. Jorge and I headed to a Buddhist temple, and George went to do some shopping. The temple was really cool, there was many caves dug out of marble! And in the caves was carvings of Buddhas and other religious figures. It was really cool. We pretty much had to scale a mountain to see all the caves, but it was worth it. Then we went to the really touristy part, the temples themselves. Many people were praying and waving burning incense around, so we had to be careful. Inside the temple halls were many sculptures, I think most were wood with paint or metal plating. I'm not sure since I couldn't touch them. We didn't have time to visit both temples, it took us almost 3 hours to visit the stone caves and the first temple, so we had to head back for the train.
We met up with George, returned our bike cards, our bike rentals cost a grand total of 39 rmb for the 3 of us. We grabbed a cab and ended up at the train station. We didn't eat lunch so I was hungry, I went to a little stand and got sticky rice and fried chicken. It was ok... hard to eat without making a mess.
When we finally got on the train there was two cute girls sitting in our seats. Sadly they were just squatters hoping that nobody had purchased those seats. When we got there, they left and some guy claimed the last seat at our table with his ticket. Bye bye cute girls... hahaha. I slept most of the way back, I needed to catch up on sleep.
All things considered, I think our trip to HangZhou was a success! We had lots of fun! I ate great food, saw new places and got lots of exercise.
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