It was another hot day 43 °C (109 F). we packed and then walked to the West Lake English Corner. During my 2 years in Hangzhou, going to the English Corner was something that I did almost every Sunday. I would take the hour long bus ride to Hangzhou, walk the 2 miles to the park, talk to a wide variety of interesting people and then treat myself to lunch at McDonalds and a short shopping trip to Walmart (Chinese style). The English corner was where I first met Penny, so it has a lot of good memories - hamburgers, french fries, real chocolate sundaes and a great friend. Usually 50-100 people would show up and they had a wide spectrum of topics to discuss - from difficult political questions all the way down to what my favorite color was. Always interesting!
Things have changed a lot. There were very few people at the park (10-15( and the questions were very bland. Frankly, I was sort of glad that they avoided asking e any embarrassing political questions and relieved that the South Seas was never mentioned. Americans are not China's favorite people right now.
Things have changed a lot. There were very few people at the park (10-15( and the questions were very bland. Frankly, I was sort of glad that they avoided asking e any embarrassing political questions and relieved that the South Seas was never mentioned. Americans are not China's favorite people right now.
Sadly, there were not many children, which were always my favorite. After about an hour, we walked back to our hotel, cooled off and then started out journey to Shanghai. We took a taxi to the fast train station and had a disappointing lunch at a Taiwanese fast food place. We caught the next bullet train 300+ km/hr (199 mph). In Shanghai, we rode the metro to the end of the line then got the hotel shuttle to finish up our 100 mile journey in under 6 hours. Traveling in China is never easy or efficient.
We checked into the Shanghai Disney Toy Story Hotel. Very cute and reasonably priced!
We went to the Disneytown for dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. Disneytown, right outside the park's main gate, is really a bunch of stores that let you buy Disney stuff while being relatively close to the Magic Kingdom without actually buying a ticket to go in. We found lots of "Hidden Mickeys" - can you find the one below?
