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| Humble Administrators Garden |
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| Humble Administrators Garden |
There was a painting there which I REALLY liked with herons and cherry blossom – not only was it 340 Yuan (£34) but I was wondering where I would put it at home. Just before we left the shop, I saw a much smaller one which was 68 Yuan (£6.80) which cherry blossom and flying bluebirds. The assistant told me it was painted on silk, but it felt more like paper to me, probably rice paper. It was so cute I decided to buy it, and she rolled it up and put it in a little box – very handy for packing away!
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| Humble Administrator's Garden |
After an entire morning at this garden, it was time for lunch, and the restaurant even had its own little garden – they just love their gardens here! After lunch and exploring the small restaurant garden, it was time to say our farewells to Lemon as it was time for her to leave us, and we would have a different local guide in Hangzhou. On the journey to Hangzhou, Jane told us a few things about Chinese culture – traditions, housing and employment. Many places in China are over employed resulting in people working just a few hours a day but get paid for the entire day, so they have a very easy life here, and in general, employees of the state / government are the best paid people. Jane also told us about the housing and how expensive it was to have an apartment in the city, and everything is valued at so many Yuan per square metre. It sounds like each apartment is quite big with a living room, 2 – 3 bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom and a utility room, some with a balcony on which to hang the washing. Many apartments in the city seemed to cost somewhere around 200,000 Yuan which is deemed incredibly expensive in China, but in the UK that currently equates to almost £20,000 which is really not expensive at all for an apartment to buy. The apartments and houses that cost 2 million Yuan equates to around the usual buying price for a nice country house or an apartment in London in the UK at around £190,000.
Something we all noticed was the laundry – not only people living in apartment blocks hung their washing outside (yes, even if they were on the 8th or 10th floor) but people who lived in smaller apartments hung their washing on racks just outside the windows overlooking the main roads. Some apartments had small balconies with washing lines, others had had pull-out frames to hang them on, or large racks with long poles to rest across. And if you were lacking room for putting your washing out to dry, you’d just find a place to hang it somewhere on the street – in trees, on traffic lights, street lights, telephone poles – anything you can string an ad-hoc washing line across or put a coat hanger on. Although I didn’t like the idea of having your washing drying over a stove in which a chicken was being boiled in a pan. I only saw it once, but I didn’t like the idea of having clothes smelling like boiled chicken...!
During the journey to Hangzhou, we were on the main roads with much farmland either side. Suddenly we started seeing small mounds decorated with colourful flowers in what seemed like very random patterns throughout some of the fields – some of the farmland had crops growing around the mounds, others had little copses of trees and mounds with decorations all around them. When we asked Jane about them, she told us these were very old graves and tombs. They had been decorated shortly before we had arrived in China – during the “Sweeping of the Tombs” or the Qing Ming Festival, where people go to their ancestors graves, take a picnic, tidy and decorate it and leave some food there as an offering. These ones in the countryside are very old – probably graves in the gardens of houses which were there long ago, but generations later they are still tended to today. Jane told us that since 2000, people can only be buried in designated cemeteries like we do in the West. In general, burying is not allowed and cremation is preferred due to lack of space, especially in the cities. However, minority Chinese are still allowed to bury their dead and usually this takes place in the countryside. Nowadays, people in Shanghai bury people in Suzhou due to the place having very good Feng Shui there.
When we began to drive past new housing developments on the way to Hangzhou, they took on a mixture of Eastern and Western architectural style. In the suburbs of Hangzhou, more high rise apartment blocks began to appear and Jane told us that most of the generic apartment blocks in the cities and suburbs are 6 – 8 floors high with no elevators – stairs all the way!
When we reached Hangzhou we noticed it was even more green than Suzhou – more trees and plants everywhere. There were many more tree-lined streets, and more grassy park areas too. The trees here (at least in Hangzhou) are protected, and it is illegal to uproot ANY tree without permission. If you DO uproot a tree, you must replace it with two new ones. It is said that in Hangzhou, each person owns 6 trees. They are well aware of pollution problems all over China, which is why if there is any wasteland anywhere, it gets planted on – for example, when we saw landscaped parks underneath flyovers and busy roads, this happens all over the country. Most parks are known as “People’s Parks” too, as most don’t have any gardens themselves so residents usually walk, dance, sing, exercise, play cards, and relax in the many public gardens around the country.
Off the bus in a well known market area, we were given quite a lot of time to walk around and explore. It was a very very long street and there were an incredible amount of shops and stalls selling all sorts of crafts and clothes, and frequent tea houses and herbal medicine stores. Mathew and I are not big market or shopping fans, but we strolled around because it was a very nice street and the buildings were also really very nice too, all historic and original, many had plaques just outside the doors explaining what they used to be, and most of the tea houses and herbal medicine stores had remained such. We even found some outdoor art at the end of the street, large concrete panels incorporating objects such as bicycles, doors and tiles which was quite fun!
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| Hangzhou Market |
There was a large pavilion overlooking the entire area, on top of a hill not too far away. I think we could have gone up there instead of strolling through the market if we’d noticed the steps up there sooner, but they were right at the other end of the street. We didn’t have a map and there was no information about the hill either, so it was probably good that we didn’t try getting up there anyway. A map or a display board would have been handy to find out how far away it really was and we could have figured the best routes. We actually thought it may have been much further away than it looked!
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| Happy Buddha in Hangzhou Market |
Back on the bus, we were introduced to our next local guide Aaron. He told us some brief facts about Hangzhou before we reached the restaurant, then onto “Lily Hotel”. He also told us that when the Chinese go to school, as soon as they begin learning English, they choose an English name, partly as part of their learning process, but also to make it easier for Westerners to pronounce. Whatever name they chose, they would keep the name for the rest of their life and introduce themselves with it to Westerners. We were told that tomorrow we would be tea-tasting, boat riding and visiting a temple and a pagoda. Should be a good day!
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