江南行 - Day 1

Day 0 (23 Jun) - Changi Airport

 

Frankly speaking, I was a bit disappointed when I saw the other members of our tour group - all uncles aunties. Then I was a bit more disappointed when I learnt that our tour guide is a guy named 杨晓峰. But on the positive side, at least the group is small, only 10 including me and Youjie, so still not so bad lah.

 

Day 1 (24 Jun) - Shanghai/HangZhou

 

MU544 is f*ck up! As Youjie has said, the plane's cabin's temperature followed the room temperature of Shanghai, which is about 30++ degree celsius. Almost suffocate to death.

 

As we came out of Pudong Airport, we saw a quite chio-looking girl waving the Kang Tai tour agency flag and hailing us over. Later we learnt that she IS the tour guide XiaoFeng. Things are looking up. =P More on her later.

 

After breakfast, we tried the Maglev Train 磁浮列车, which is absolutely unremarkable. Afterwhich we travelled by a minibus to HangZhou. There, the tour started.

 

First stop, 水乡乌镇 . It's quite a nice place actually, one of the four 水乡 in China, and the only with real villagers living in it. 古色古香, with a river through the town. Very peaceful, if the thousands of tourists in it suddenly disappear.

 

Later nothing much, just went 岳王庙 before an early dinner and checking in hotel. In hotel, all the aunties and uncles collapsed, understandable after 5 hrs of suffering in the plane. However, in an effort to demostrate the tremendous amount of energy present in S'pore youths, we asked for directions from XiaoFeng and took a cab by ourselves to HangZhou's equivilant of Orchard Road, 延安路.

 

There we quickly learnt that there is one thing good and one thing bad about China's traffic. The good thing is that zebra crossings are everywhere. The bad thing is that China cars only stop for zebras at zebra crossings, not pedestrians. And while in the taxi (da3 di1 or 出租车 in China) we also learnt that China drivers are extremely friendly. No matter whether the car they are driving is behind, beside or in front of another car, they won't fail to press their horns as a way to say hi. Imagine how heartwarming we felt when we can't stop hearing car horns as we walked along 延安路.

 

Bought 5 shirts from various boutiques for around 100 rmb (S$20)! Then we went some place (forget the name already) to da bao some dumplings for supper. Got a culture shock when guy pour the soup and dumplings into a plastic bag and hand the plastic bag to us. As soon as we were out of the shop, Youjie and I engaged in a friendly discussion on whose smart idea it was to take away instead of eating in the house.

 

 

That's about all for day 1. Gonna fast forward a bit from now on.

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED...