Last week after finals, Maggie and I took a trip to Shaoxing. It is an hour away by bus. It was my first experience using the bus station and I was glad Maggie was with me. I learned enough by watching Maggie that I probably could do it by myself if I had to. I can now decipher the tickets, boarding areas and when to get on. The seats on the bus were very comfortable and after a nice nap we arrived in Shaozing. We took a taxi to our 3 star hotel and after settling in we took a taxi to the other bus station to buy a ticket to Zhuji for the next day.
Side Note & Explanation - That is one of the strange things in China, you have to buy the train or bus ticket from the place you are leaving from. You cannot buy all your trip tickets at the same location or time. You cannot buy train tickets more than 5 days in advance. Some things here are so computerized and some things are so archaic. They do have some satellite stores that sell train tickets for an extra fee. This at least saves us an hour trip to the station to purchase tickets. So unless you are using a tour company, part of every trip is spent waiting in line to buy tickets back.
We took a walk thru the older part of town. There were lots of beggars, canals, small streets and small buildings. We had dinner and then a nice night boat ride thru the canals. The canals run around the whole city and they light up the buildings along the water edge. Except for being extremely hot it was a great way to see the city.
Next day we toured East Lake, which was an ancient quarry (some of the rocks were used in the Great Wall) that has been turned into a park. We took a boat ride where the guide paddled with his feet. I decided I needed to buy at least one ‘tourist souvenir” so I got an old retired Calligraphy teacher to paint a rock saying that I had been there. It looked like a better job than being a greeter at Wal-Mart (which they have here – even though I haven’t seen one yet).
After East Lake we stopped by the hotel to cool off then had lunch at a famous restaurant which was conveniently located next door. Ummmm, and with the fragrance of “stinky tofu” filling the air -we had lunch. Maggie sucked snails from the shell. I tried one but they seemed like too much work for such a small piece of meat. We went to some of the houses of some of the famous people that once lived in Shaoxing including a writer Lu Xun and Mr. Cai Yuan Pei, a scholar. (Side note - The late Premier Zhou Enlai is from here). It was interesting but not real memorable because I couldn’t read the descriptions. I just knew that they were a famous writer and a famous educator. The most memorable part of the historical tour were all the beggars that latched on to me. One really mean old lady was the worse. I made the mistake of giving out a few coins on the way up this alley (no escape for the tourist) so going back down the alley was really bad. After we finished our historical/beggar part of the tour we packed up and caught the bus to Zhuji.
