Our trip to the villages

Did I mention that we were going to spend the last few days renting a van with Yong and his friends, going around to small villages outside of Shanghai? I imagined taking pictures of farmers and sleeping in chicken coops.

We took a train out to Hangzhou. An incredibly, crowded, loud train. Yong and fay were staring at each other and giggling in Chinese. The city, which was the capital of a couple of dynasties, sits next to a lake, in the middle of which are islands on which monestaries have been built. Sounds quiant. In fact, Hangzhou has a population of 3.75 million, a couple of Farrari dealerships, and at least one restaurant that seats more than 1000 people at a time. On May 1, the national holiday, more than 6,000,000 descend on this sleepy little hamlet, which is more than 10 times the size of St. Louis, and a good majority of those that missed the Mayday celbration decided to go for it last Friday.

We were on a guided tour. So a little chick with a megaphone yelled at us in Chinese for two days. Nuff said. On the upside, we visited a monestary, climbed a mountain, saw a bunch of carvings, visited a tea farm, visited a silk factory, went into a mountain that has crystal stallagtites and got yelled at by another chick with a megaphone.

Ahh.