Hangzhou/Suzhou - Oct 28th - Oct 30th, 2004
After lunch in Shaoxing we made an hour long drive into the city of Hangzhou which happens to be the capital of Zhejiang province. Hangzhou is a city of about 7 million (so I'm told) and it was a bit of a surprise for me. I was vaguely familiar with most of the major cities in China and did not beyond Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong I did not expect to be in another major, I figured we'd be visiting their "villages" the rest of the time (if you call half a million a village). Hangzhou is very much a fullsize major city that dwarfs most of the cities I've ever visited. Alas, I don't think I would visit Hangzhou for more than 2 days.
Our first stop was some shrine for a general that was martyred several hundread years ago, located outside of their West Lake (right in downtown, it wasn't much of a sight compared to the other things I had seen up till now. Following that we went to a tea farm to see how tea was made and it was here where the rest of the group induldged and spent a heap of money on tea of which I thought was of questionable taste although it did promise that it would provide a lot of health benefits.
Hangzhou Nights - Wow! What an interesting consumerist downtown! Our hotel was situated right in the middle of downtown and it afforded us our first real taste of a bustling consumer nation at work. The downtown shopping area was bloody huge! Ernie and I mostly window shopped as we were mostly just there to see what it was like and it took us over an hour just to get to one end of downtown by foot. During our walk we passed by 4 Adidas stores and 3 Nike stores. We also passed by numerous McDonald's and KFCs.
All of Hangzhou seemed to be up to something including the pimps which I cover in this aside. There were numerous stores that were still being built or worked on as late as 10pm. It wasn't small stuff either like the moving in of more supplies but of wholesale construction. There was hustle and bustle everywhere and it didn't tail off as long as I was downtown.
West Lake - The next morning we got up nice and early to head out onto West Lake, their lake which is located next to the city centre. Unfortunately, like most of China, Hangzhou is quite polluted and the pollution put a big damper on the boat cruise across the lake. If the skies had been clear then we would have been treated to a very nice sight, the areas around the lake are quite nice but due to the pollution most of my pictures of the lake didn't turn out.
Leaving Hangzhou, Going to Suzhou - Other than a very interesting downtown core that never seemed to shut down I can't say much for Hangzhou. The places I saw were nice but they weren't grand enough or detailed enough to elicit deep interest from me. The massive amounts of pollution also put a damper on things, perhaps it was the warmer weather that made the pollution seem worse than ever but I'd never seen such a dense layer of pollution anywhere before.
Seeing Suzhou - Suzhou was a bit of a disappointment, after cities like Shaoxing and Hangzhou I expected a little more but Suzhou felt rundown and small (it isn't). The only thing I found interesting was the traffic at rush hour - it was our first true rush hour experience in China and it was awesome (see the asides for more). Our tour guide seemed to work for Kodak or Fuji as she insisted that we take pictures of everything we saw and would stand waiting for us to take some shots of things that weren't really all that interesting. However, it was here where we saw some "nice" translations. And shit if there isn't anything in Suzhou to look at during the night.
The Silk Factory - Our last stop in Suzhou before we headed to Shanghai was to a silk factory. Most of the members of the tour group had already visited this place and were mostly here to simply buy more stuff since the silk blankets were so much cheaper than anywhere else. It was rather interesting that they let tourists just walk right into their factory and stand next to fast moving machinery. It was here where I spotted a luxurious bedding set. Unfortunately it cost well over $300 Canadian and I couldn't justify that for my bed at this point as I figure I'll be getting a bigger bed at some point. Anyways, off to Shanghai!
The Pimping
Oh, the pimping! I had heard stories about the pimping in China before I came as well (it's hard to avoid that stuff). I heard of stories where you could "da fei ji" (get a handjob - literally, fly an airplane) for as little as $20 Chinese dollars (about $3 CDN) and I heard lots about fake hair salons that were really brothels in the back so I was plenty excited about seeing some of this (but not trying it).
So what was it like? Well, I didn't see any in Beijing but when I arrived in Shaoxing the kimono was opened for me. That first night that I wandered around on their streets I walked by a "hair salon" and was promptly waved at by the 3 girls that were just inside the door - I suppose I needed a haircut or something. Since it was my first sighting I decided to do another walkby from across the street and after the second trip I was certain it was a "hair salon". As I wandered down the main strip later I saw two "hair salons" side by side and in one were about 8 girls all dressed in the same red tracksuits while in the other there was a man coming down the stairs to paid for his "haircut". This was just the start.
Hangzhou was where the action was though and what action there was to be had. We were staying right in the downtown core and as soon as Ernie and I descended into the streets with our Western dollars the pimps were on us like a flock of seagulls seeing salmon near the surface of the water. Immediately they started gesticulating to us with massage hand motions while Ernie and I choose either to say "I don't want it" or "I don't speak Mandarin" in Mandarin. This did little to slow these low rent gigolos as they often followed us for a full block before giving up and passing us up to the next set of cheap suits.
In all we were hit up at least a dozen times by the grey suits in Hangzhou. They teased us with lines like "Local girls, straight up to your room." (that's all the English they knew) We even got hit up by one of the prostitutes who was standing on a corner who we turned down only to see a low rent pimp right next to her jump on us and go "Massage!". Hangzhou was awesome for this sort of thing.
It was harder to tell in Shanghai as there was a lot more bustle at night and there really were hair salons that were open till Midnight. Hell, most of Shanghai was open till Midnight if not later.
Hong Kong did not have any pimping going on but Macau sure did and it was quite different from the other types of pimping that went on in China. In Macau the hookers were big, tall Russian women. I don't know what compelled them to come to Macau or to the Southern part of China but there they were standing nearly 6 feet tall in their heels. There was no effort to hide what they did, they weren't standing on a quiet corner, they were standing on busy corners with loads of pedestrians and near a police station. None of them tried to push their wares on us though.
All in all the pimping in China was a lot "better" than the pimping in Canada. I never got close enough to make much of an evaluation of the people behind (their lives, not their work) it but it pretty much was everywhere.