Day 18

For worship this morning we headed by bus to Hangzhou International Christian Fellowship.  It's a church for only internationals and you have to have a foreign passport to enter.  Luckily for some people, as well as our Chinese-national helpers, they didn't check for them.  The service was done in English by a pastor from Africa (he didn't say where) and an international worship team.  We kind of increased the attendance by several hundred percent I believe.  Initially we were all sitting by ourselves, but during the greeting we all said hi and spread out amongst the regulars.  I met a lady who has relatives in St. Joseph.  The sermon was about choices and our choice to remain faithful to God.  We fellowshipped for a while after the service with the members of the church.  The far was a bit different than the coffee and cookies from back home.  There were oranges, bananas, cookies, chocolate covered marshmallows, crackers, chips, dragon-eyeball fruits and a host of drinks for us.  I think that we can learn a few lessons from the Chinese church.  In food and fervor perhaps.  For a while, I talked with a physicist/engineer who grew up in China, worked for a company making solar cells in Princeton, NJ for 28 years, and moved back to work in Hangzhou (he grew up in Shanghai and visits there frequently).

A few of us left (Marshall, Ben and Ben) to go back to the hotel.  For lunch we stopped at 85°C Café for some baked goods which were quite tasty and pizza themed.  We took the bus again to get back.  A cute Chinese girl sat down next to me, and I would have liked to talk to her, but I could only say, "Knee-how."  I'm guessing that she didn't speak English, because she reciprocated my greeting, talked to her friends for a bit then sat quietly (typically Chinese people like to practice English if they know it).  When we got off I said, "Dway boo chee" (excuse me) then, "Zi gee'en" (goodbye).  She said something in Chinese and I think said "Good bye" in English.  Sometimes I really wish I could speak Chinese.

Marshall and I hung out in the room checking e-mail and whatnot, for a bit then headed out to see one of the pagodas on the top of a hill overlooking West Lake and the city.  A couple of guys had done it before so we got some basic directions from them, and then headed out walking along the water.  The entrance was a very non-descript residential looking road.  There were no obvious markings in English (maybe it was obvious in Chinese, hard to tell), but we went in anyway.  The street rose a bit to some stairs.  A lot of stairs actually, which twisted and turned through a bamboo forest, up to a restaurant, then up further to where the pagoda actually was.  You couldn't go inside (I'm not sure if there ever was an inside) and it was fenced off.  The "windows" were bricked closed (like I said though, it might have just been solid).  It was cool, pretty tall and stood out against the sky and trees.  There was a path that continued up, past the pagoda, so we took it to see what else there was.  What we found was even better than the pagoda.  The hill has a spectacular view of West Lake and the city of Hangzhou.  It is phenomenal.  You can do a lot of climbing on the rocks or none at all; most people were climbing all over though.  The hills were all misty like they had been the last couple of days, and the lake was full of boats that people had rented for a while.  The causeway was visible below, and I could see pretty much every part of the lake that we had walked a couple of days before.  Marshall was pretty glad that I convinced him to come with me.  We met the Jens on the way down.  I'm sure they enjoyed it.  Some of the places that people were climbing were pretty dangerous.  There's no way that any of this would happen in the U.S.  There would have to be railings and guard rails everywhere, and people would probably insist on their being some sort of cable to the top or elevator.  Marshall and I were talking about this on the way up, and I jokingly referred to the "fat Americans" stereotype (which is becoming alarmingly true, sadly), and a Chinese man passing in front of us heard it.  I think he said, "Russians?" or something like that.  Hopefully I haven't caused him to think that all Americans are fat and that all Russians are vindictive.  That's actually the second time that a Chinese person has thought that I was Russian.  Either way, the hill was cool and I'm very glad that we decided to take the afternoon and climb it.

Eventually we headed back into town.  We tried to hear the musical fountain, but we didn't want to wait for it to start up again.  Instead we got some supper (sweet and sour chicken with peppers and peaches in the sauce; we had it the other night too) at a restaurant we'd been to before on the main street.  At that point we were pretty tired so we decided to head back to the hotel and just rest for the duration of night.  We have to be ready early for the train back to Shanghai tomorrow.  I'm getting pretty excited about getting the wool coat I had tailored (hopefully there won't be too much disappointment).

There were some movies on tonight.  It felt good just to be off my feet.  We've been walking for what seems like forever.  It was a great last day in Hangzhou.