Shanghai Expat: April 2010: Hangzhou Day 2

I took these pictures this day. Di Yin also took even more. The latter link goes to the first picture from this day (picture #85). If you're in slideshow mode and see a picture of our local kindergarten, you've cycled back to the beginning of the album and are seeing pictures I already linked to.

We began the day walking through one of Hangzhou's old neighborhoods on the way back to Zhiweiguan to breakfast. This time we ate at the cafeteria-like place on the first floor.

From there, we walked along the West Lake for a bit, enjoyed the fountain show, then took a smooth boat ride to Three Pools Mirroring the Moon island (Xiaoying Island). It was as similarly pretty and kept up as the parks along the lake that we visited the previous day. Though we didn't see everything on the island, everything was I'm sure the same as what we've seen. Indeed, the same could probably be said of the parks and promenades that we walked the previous day east of the lake; we saw only a fraction of the space, but what we saw was probably representative.

Another smooth boat trip brought us to Gushan Island, where we wandered through Zhongshan Park.

We walked across the bridge to the mainland, then walked along the north-west side of the lake, eventually venturing inland. During this time we hunted for food, a futile effort because there were so few buildings around. It was all parks and gardens and water and attractive nature in general. Eventually we found a place, Emerald Villa. Eating there felt like dining in a forest with a river nearby. Looking out the large windows, we could see a glimpse of blue past all the green.

We tried to find a walk I wanted to do near a temple but couldn't. Instead, we found tea plantations. (Hangzhou is famous for tea.) When we decided to begin returning to the correct side of the lake, we took a crowded bus back to the vicinity of Gushan Island, and walked across the island then down the beautiful Bai Causeway (a long, narrow, pedestrian-only land bridge) and back into town.

We ended up having dinner at a well regarded (mainly noodle soup) place, Kui Yuan Guan, near our hotel, picked up our bags, headed to the train station, and made our way home.