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Today we left Shanghai to move to Hangzhou. We woke up and were ready to leave by 10am when Shannon noticed we didn't have to check out until 12pm. So we left our bags in the room and went up to the bar on the rooftop to have breakfast. We had a club sandwich, orange juice and a coffee each before heading back down to the room to collect our things and check out.
To get to Hangzhou we needed to take two metro lines and then a bullet train. The metros were pretty straight forward but when we got to the bullet train station we had to buy our tickets. We attempted to use the automatic machine but it was all in Chinese so we had to line up to get served by a teller. When we got to the front of the line Shannon tried to say we wanted two tickets to Hangzhou but our pronunciation was not very good because she had no idea what we were trying to say. Shannon had to bring up the word on his phone and show her that and then she finally knew what we were talking about.
Once we had our tickets we had to make a fast paced walk to the platform because we didn't have long before the train was departing. We made it with about ten minutes to spare and got comfortable.
After an hour we arrived in Hangzhou. We took the metro one stop and then headed out onto the street to find our hostel. When we got onto the street we had to push our way through a big sea of Muslim men and carts selling dried fruit. Not sure what the occasion was but it was very busy.
After a kilometre we made it to the hostel. It seems like a pretty decent place. We dropped our bags in our room and then went for a walk down to the lake to find food. After 30mins of walking we stopped to eat at a place called Secret Recipe. I had noodles and fried chicken and Shannon had popcorn chicken and chicken parmigiana. His parmigiana was not very good at all. However we then had a piece of cheesecake each and they were both excellent so that cancelled out all the bad parts of the meal.
We went back out into the cold (without our coats because we'd left them at the hostel which had turned out to be an error) and walked around the lake a bit before making our way back to the hostel.
I like Hangzhou so far. It's not as city like as Shanghai and the lake seems very beautiful with some traditional looking boats floating on it. There was also a big temple on the top of a mountain that we could see and might try to visit. We walked through a food market arcade on our way back as well and there were some very interesting things for sale including chicken feet on skewers and whole birds. We could smell bugs cooking as well but we didn't see any. I don't think we'll be rushing back to eat at that place anyway.
We are now having a drink in the hostel. There are some sweet cats that live here that are running around and we've gotten a few pats so that's nice. It's pretty empty in the common room at the moment. Maybe because it's dinner time? Anyway, I accidentally ordered straight vodka so I'm having an interesting time trying to drink that.
We had a small pizza to share for dinner before heading back upstairs to sleep.
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