I realize that the Shanghai Edition of this blog is my most popular feature, so I am pushing out back-to-back posts about more of my experiences in China.
Two weekends ago I travelled to Hangzhou to support a colleague running the Hangzhou marathon. I did not run the marathon myself. Hangzhou is a very developed city about an hour southwest from Shanghai on the high-speed rail (HSR). It is most famous for its picturesque West Lake and for being where Alibaba’s main headquarters is located.
Booking the HSR ticket was a pain as you need to connect your real-name authenticated identity with a Chinese railway app called 12306 to book a train ticket (no such requirements for plane tickets, I guess it’s impossible for people to enter or leave the country otherwise). But I ended up having to go to the train station itself a day or two before to stand in line for tickets, and “tying” my passport (i.e. real name) to 12306 in person at the train station service center.
The other alternative is to buy tickets at special ticket counters throughout the city, but none were close to where I live or work. Then there is a special lane for foreigners when you go through the gates at the station.
Saturday evening I arrived at a Holiday Inn, which was an experience in of itself. These hotels aren’t exactly luxury ones in the US, but they are in China. Because of my status as a Spire Elite member with Intercontinental Hotels (a distinction I earned while staying at the Crowne Plaza in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay for more than a month for work) around only $80 a night I was upgraded to a very nice room and given 2 drink vouchers. I also got a 15% discount on the food I ordered for dinner.
What?? You’re lucky to get bottled water in the US! There must be so much competition between the hotels leading to such niceties. The wine with the drink vouchers was quite good Chilean (?) wine and the Hainanese Chicken Rice was good too. At a Holiday Inn. I forgot to take pictures, you can look it up yourselves!
The next morning, the marathon itself began and ended near West Like, but we never got to see the lake because it was so crowded in the vicinity of the finish line (the Huanglong sports stadium). Below is a picture of the stadium. It was pretty interesting because the inner ring of the stadium, not in the stadium itself, was filled with restaurants. Everywhere around the stadium were restaurants.
We arrived around 11 AM and the marathon ended around 1 pm. Apparently this marathon is a lot easier to get spots in than the Shanghai marathon, which gives spots mainly to foreign runners.
My other colleague and I watched the finishing runners from a vantage point and ended up cheering on our colleague as she approached the finish line. After it was done we went to a local restaurant and toured a creative colony (? essentially a lot of creative industries and cafes in the same area).
Hard to believe China has such a place, but there you go. Most of Southeast China is considered the cultural center of the country. On the other hand, the traffic is notorious for being very bad, so we spent a lot of time in DiDi rideshares.
Actually I have been to West Lake and Hangzhou before, since I have family in the area – My grandfather on my dad’s side has a sister who lives in the vicinity, and I visited her and other extended family members around when I was in middle school. They lived a hour or more drive away from Hangzhou in nice villas now that they made some money off of owning a factory. They also had a small lake where we took a speedboat ride (grandpa’s sister included) and I remember playing ping-pong with some extended family as well. Needless to say, times have changed since those folks were growing up.
These are the family that my grandfather could not return to in China after 1949, as he had gone to Taiwan prior to the Nationalist Government escaping there from the mainland. He did not see them again until the 1980s.
There is one more tidbit about the Hangzhou trip that is interesting: I booked the wrong ticket going back so had to quickly get another one at the ticket window in East Hangzhou station. But they could not provide any more tickets on the same train going back, they only had tickets for the next train. Fine, I thought. But my colleague ended up actually booking a ticket for me on the original train through CTrip, one of the travel booking apps I covered in my other post, by “competing” for an online ticket for that train. You compete by inviting friends to support your “competition” for that ticket as they click into a link and “push” you forward in the app. We won the ticket, so away I went.
Until next time…