WEEk 4
It has been a month in China, the longest that I’ve been away from home. I am really surprised that I am surviving here and slowly adapting the culture and the lifestyle of China. It has been a month and most of us are getting used to using all the apps in Chinese and using our mediocre Chinese skills to survive.
Besides attending our lessons and going for cultural trips, as students who are on an exchange program, we definitely need to make use of the fact that we are overseas and go travelling when possible! Quite a few of us have already begun figuring out how to book tickets on their apps and travelling out of Hangzhou. This week my friends and I went to Wuzhen for a day visit and it was like a rollercoaster ride for my poor heart. We also visited a night market which actually closes too early to be a ‘night’ market. And we went to Long Jing Village（龙井村）to climb a small mountain, catch a good scenery and try some Long Jing tea.
The mini Venice of China
Wuzhen is a tourist attraction and it seems to be a must to go, to have a taste of the scenery of the river and the unique houses. We took a train from the Hangzhoudong train station and the train ride was only 18 mins, whereas a taxi ride there would have been about 2 hours. To buy the tickets at the train station, passports are a must, but a last resort would be to use a photocopy of the passport. At Wuzhen, the reason why some of us called it the mini Venice of China was because there were rows or houses that were along the river bank and tourists could take a boat ride from the east to the west.
The day scenery was beautiful but the night scenery was even more amazing. The night view with all the lights and the reflection in the water was beautiful. However, it was a pity that it was raining that evening and we could not take proper pictures.
Long Jing Village
The name of the village literally translates to Dragon Well and in this place, there are quite a number of plantations and tea houses. There are stairs to climb up the mountain and only after slowly climbing the never-ending steps and taking multiple breaks, we made it to the top and managed to take multiple pictures of the breathtaking view.
Luckily, going up was the hard part and going down was easy, making it less tiring and we easily made our way down back to the bottom. We then went into a teahouse and tried the famous Long Jing tea, turns out the tea was extremely easy to make and quite delicious to drink.
I’ll be looking forward to even more trips within and out of Hangzhou!
