Wuzhen

On the outskirts of Hangzhou, the bus to Wuzhen pulled into a large, new, gleaming bus station. We were there for 10 minutes or so. No one got on or off. There was no one inside on the long rows of waiting-room chairs, and just a few people who seemed to work there. The place was surrounded by empty fields, but a short distance away was a cluster of what looked like high-rise apartment buildings, most of them under construction. It was eerie, a sort of mirror image of science fiction movie scenes of long-abandoned, crumbling cities. This was the yet-uninhabited ghost of a town waiting to be born, and for some reason, it had bus service.

I'd wanted to see a water town, the kind with canals and perhaps people in conical hats, but Wuzhen had just one canal and hordes of tour groups. It wasn't without its charms, though--the wooden buildings that lined the canal were both pretty and lived-in, and the residents hung their laundry out to dry with little concern for how many boatloads of tourists saw their underwear. There was an exhibit of money from around the world, which perhaps the waitress my last dinner would have enjoyed, but which I found rather random. I liked the exhibit on wood carvings, though, and the separate collection of elaborately carved beds.

On coming to Hangzhou I'd switched from my muddy hiking shoes to my other pair, a comfortable but pretty pair of purple ballet flats. I say "comfortable," but after two days of much walking my heels were feeling tender. So I took a bicycle rickshaw back from the old part of the village to the bus station, a distance probably a bit under a mile. It was the first time I'd taken anunmetered taxi, so I tried out my bargaining skills again. The man told me 10 yuan, I offered him 5, and he took it. I felt a little guilty about that--it's less than a dollar, a pretty paltry sum for being pulled across the village through someone else's physical effort.

I had to wait awhile for the next bus to Hangzhou. Some people in the terminal stared at me, and one teenage boy came and looked over my shoulder curiously as I wrote in my journal. I wasn't very far from either cosmopolitan Hangzhou orWuzhen's touristy old town, but they felt very distant.

If my trip to Wuzhen had been so-so, my evening back in Hangzhou made up for it. I ate at a vegetarian restaurant on Yanning Road that had, I think, the longest menu I'd ever seen. They apparently didn't actually have many of the things on the menu, but no matter. I ordered fake pork and corn juice on the waitress's suggestion, and fake shark's fin soup. The food was excellent. Along with the dishes atLamu's House of Tibet, it was the best I had in China. The bill came to 96 Yuan, more than 10 times what the previous night's dinner had cost, but still only $14.

After dinner I strolled through the lively night market in the square nearby. It was a little like Beijing's snack street, but with fewer snacks and more of other things, from furniture to fingernail clippers. From there I went down to the lake, where the paths are illuminated at night in a way that's downright romantic. There were fountains in the lake a short distance south of me, and I went to admire them.