Being Touristy

This week has been largely uneventful, comprised mostly of dodging large downpours of rain resulting from a nearby typhoon, making various afternoon excursions to grocery stores and to find new cafes, poring over maps and entertainment guides, and making various culinary discoveries. It’s been great, largely because I’m making a point of staying away from campus in the afternoons when I’m not in class.

This afternoon I didn’t have anything to do after 2:00, and since I don’t have much to prepare for tomorrow, either, I decided to go to the South end of town and see some of the historic sights of West Lake. Most of the interesting places are on an island in the middle of the lake, but there’s a pagoda and some pretty park areas along the Southern perimeter which I hadn’t yet been to. I got Jingbo to go with me, since he didn’t have class either. The two of us took the bus past the swankier West Lake area with all of the Western style restaurants and got off at a park full of sculptures, willow trees, touring rowboats and, apparently, a miniature version of Seaworld. We walked the stone pathways around the perimeter of the lake to the Pagoda, took the escalator up the hill (yep, that’s right) and spent a good bit of time taking in the scenery from the top.

The Pagoda, it seems, is a relatively recent reconstruction, but it’s quite pretty and offers a good vantage of West Lake and downtown Hangzhou. You can walk around and see the islands, the site of some old imperial buildings, the tree-lined parks encircling the Eastern side of the lake, the towering office buildings behind them, and the essentially untouched mountains immediately to the South. It’s strange, you can literally walk five or ten minutes from the largest tourist center probably in the province, and find yourself in a Zen temple at the feet of several entirely undeveloped mountains. The city basically stops just South of the lake. I’m sure it’s the sudden spike in elevation that’s slowed sprawl in these areas, but I’m curious what it’ll look like in ten years.

After perusing the pagoda and the excavation of the original foundation beneath, we headed back through the walkways to a quite reasonably priced teahouse we’d seen coming in. I’m pretty sure in the West such prime real estate would have already been bought up and replaced with an upscale alternative, but that particular sort of development seems to be confined to the lakeside “Tiandi” district farther North. We sat outside and slowly sipped our tea (which came with a really large pitcher of hot water for refilling), and did a bit of studying. Jingbo was hungry so we ordered some snacks. I let him choose and we ended up with a plate of individually wrapped Necco wafers that turned out to be hawthorn flavored (thank you, beloved dictionary, answerer of inane but pressing questions). Luckily, I learned the word for peanuts yesterday at the grocery store, so I quickly added a plate to our order. It was quite nice, whiling away the afternoon by the lake, listening to outdated pop music, browsing our dictionaries for particularly interesting words, cracking peanuts and throwing in the occasional bit of study.