Puddle Stomping

Umbrellas seem almost to be a way of life in China. When I was in Beijing several years ago, I grew accustomed to carrying a wonderfully light, collapsible yellow umbrella wherever I went, holding it high to shade the harsh May sunlight, which actually comes from everywhere because of the white dome of smog that covers the city. People don’t use raincoats, except for these really cool poncho things I saw today that are built for use on bikes and electric scooters. The front is long enough and shaped perfectly to cover the arms all the way down to the handlebars, and drape over the front basket. It was kind of cool to see all of the bikers in identical, brightly colored ponchos speeding through an intersection. Next time it rains I’ll be sure to get a picture.

It’s not as sunny in early September Hangzhou, so I planned to wait until my first market shopping expedition to buy one this time around, mostly to have something small and simple to look for and practice bargaining with. My hand was forced when I woke up this morning and discovered a persistent downpour outside.
After breakfast, Weilin, Xueqin and I had a rather leisurely hour and a half to kill before class, so we went over to the campus convenience store to buy our yucan (umbrellas: I’m continuously tempted to pepper this with Chinese phrases, please forgive the occasional vocabulary lesson). I took some time to peruse the selection of largely unidentifiable snacks which take up the bulk of shelf space in the store. It seems Chinese people like their snacks small, sweet, crunchy, and often with various strange fillings. There’s also an entire aisle devoted to cup-of-noodles in diverse flavors and containers, most slightly larger than a pint of ice cream. It seems whether in China or America, college students really like to eat fangbian mian (literally “convenient noodles”). Xueqin and I picked out brightly colored umbrellas with flower decals, while Weilin settled on a more suitable dark plaid.

My last class ended at 2:30, and I really didn’t want to sit in my dorm all day, so I seized on a bit of advice offered up from semesters past: “Don’t wait around for a group of people to decide when to eat, where to go, etc. If it’s not going to get decided, leave and do your own thing” (the speaker was apparently diabetic, and said if he’d waited each time people couldn’t decide where to eat, his health would have been at risk). So I grabbed some Hangzhou magazines and set off on a bus toward a coffee house I’d seen reviewed and knew I could find. I had quite a nice afternoon sipping my espresso and reading up on Hangzhou life and events, and perusing the maps to further fit together in my head exactly where things are. I managed to figure out a route to yet another sight of interest, which I walked to and got on a different bus to come back.