Hangzhou Crowds

During Mid-Autumn Festival in China you get a week off from work. Teachers, business professionals, whoever all get October 1st-8th off. Many Chinese families work in one city and send money to their children or parents who live in a different city and this is the one time in the year they can all reunite. During this time off many Chinese citizens choose to go to relaxing cities instead of bustling ones.
My co-worker and I decide to vacation but since we are last minute most tickets and hotels are sold out and we want to go somewhere close to us.
Both me, my co-worker, and half of China decide to go to visit Hangzhou. Hangzhou is famous for its West Lake which has shops, night markets, fountain shows, boat rides, and food places. It is really nice.

We stayed in an AirBNB and got around mostly by taxi. There is a metro in Hangzhou apparently but I hardly saw any stops and we were discouraged from traveling on it since there were so many people in the city. We did use it but sparingly. Even biking in some parts of the city was barely possible. Mostly we walked. At one point we walked from the bottom of the lake to the right side and it took us 40 minutes. On WeChat there is a function to count your steps and we averaged 30,000 a day there.

The first thing we did was go to Linying Temple. It is full of street food and little shops. The temple cost 40 yuan per person. The temple area is mostly walking trails and Buddha statues carved in the stone which is pretty! At one point we walked up this mountain and noticed we were finally alone. We got to the top and discovered...nothing. It was just a cliff to climb and look at trees, which would be cool except it was foggy that day. We almost went on another trail but a man told us that the only thing up that mountain was a rock that said, "You did it!" Hard pass.
The temple had a few worship centers and a place to drink tea (it was closed). I noticed there were hardly any monks. When we tried to leave we saw a huge building which was the actual Linying Temple which cost another 40 yuan to get in. Looking in there were hundreds of monks in yellow outfits walking around. Part of me wishes we gone in but the other part was tired of being there for hours, hiking up mountains, and desperately wanted lunch.

The next stop was a night market. They weren't booths but actual shops and they sold souveniors, papercut art, cairicatures, and tons of food. The food included fish, crabs, beef skewers, noodles, and bugs. One store sold fried animals like scorpions, trantulas, and seahorses. It was a bit tramatizing. The area is famous for crabs which is a bit obvious because they sold crabs on sticks EVERYWHERE. They also sold huckleberry covered in sugar on sticks too. I recommend strawberries over huckleberries as huckleberries have four pretty good sized seeds inside.

Second stop was going to the lake. We boated to an area called Three Moon Reflection Island. It is called that because the island has three lakes side by side and the moon fits into each perfectly during the Mid Autumn Festival. It. was. packed. We saw these little pagodas that had facts inside them, restaurants, or little temples which are on each side of the island. There were tons of souvenir booths along the roads too. I would love to go at night to see how the moon reflects on the water but we couldn't find tickets that sold for that time. Maybe next time.

The other popular attraction on the island is the Lei Feng Pagoda. At night it is lit up and really beautiful. We went inside the courtyard for Lei Feng Pagoda and outside, leading up to the building, is an escalator. Bless. It was a lot of stairs. We went up the escalator and visited the museum inside. The temple dates back many years but was recently rebuilt, however the rubble is preserved in a giant glass room. We climbed up four flights of stairs and met with, you guessed it, a bunch of people. I have a fear of falling so once we reached the top it was breath taking and terrifying. I got a few pictures but the entire time I was worried about dropping something over the edge, myself included.

In the evening we went to a mall area and shopped. Big cities have tons of foreign brands the most popular are Japanese, British, and American. Be warned that British and American brands are super pricey as you are buying a "foreign experience." Even french fries in the food market were more expensive just because they were Western. That night we watched the fountain music and light show but was barely visible where we were due to the crowds. It was still very fun seeing sprays of water shoot up to Celion Dion.

We visited museums on the last day. One was for a general named Yue Fei. He conquered and united most parts of China until 1141 when minister Qin Hui said that the war should end and peace talks should take place. Yue Fei tried to continue taking back Chinese provinces but was seen as a traitor for not following orders. Yue Fei was beheaded in 1142 alongside his son and many of his soldiers. Today he is seen as a national hero for trying to resist foreign powers and uphold Chinese values. The other museums included a calligraphy museum and a lacquer museum. 

The Zhejiang Science and Technology Museum was the very last place we went before we headed to the train station. It was all free thanks to a business man from America. The museum was cut into several parts, dinosaurs, animals, and science-technology. There was an IMAX theatre too. The science-technology part had a section dedicated to not doing drugs which was a stretch as it was directly next to a model of a nuclear reactor. Overall, the animals were super funny to look at as the taxidermy made them look a bit derpy but it was informational even for me as all the museum was written in English and Chinese.

The moral of the story is that even if you are last minute you can find things to do and places to stay. Asking locals is a great idea. There were many times when our map app led us the wrong way but a stranger did not. They also let us know what we could do in the city during that time. Very nice people.