Day 5 - Hangzhou

Off the plane from Xi'an, we drove to Hangzhou; it said to be one of the most beautiful places in China. We passed lots of art-deco looking houses, many in pastel colours and topped with flat roofs. They were a strange sight. We took a little boat cruise on the West Lake. Like everywhere in China, it's impossible to go for a nice quiet stroll by yourself, this scenic lake was densely packed with people. As we were to leave, we got into a bus accident, leaving us with this first of many pictures featuring me and the word "Long".
Our guide in the Shanghai area was Julien. He was perhaps the most memorable guide of all, but for all the wrong reasons. He began by describing Hangzhou as a very romantic city and gradually moved on to how cold women in the area were and then to bemoaning his generally inability to get a girlfriend. His worst moment occured when we were on a boat and he told everyone, in french, to look at the pretty girl dressed in red and how she didn't even pay him any attention. Not only was it very unprofessional but there happened to be some other bilingual guides on the boat also.
Once we got to our hotel, Etienned and I needed to go buy some clothes. We got 10$ pants from Taizi Long, and 3$ shirts from Trust-Mart. This was also a high pressure shopping experience because we really needed clothes and the stores were closing in a few minutes. The manager at Trust-Mart kept telling me to go wait in line instead of letting me look for some laundry detergent. They even turned off the lights at one point when there were still dozens of people lined up. The shirts were very comfortable but they've sadly shrunken by something like 50% now that I've washed and dryed them in a machine. 9$ wasted! The hotel TV had a program teaching some Go strategies, we thought this was pretty cool.
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