A Weekend in Wuzhen

The weather is getting beautiful, which makes us want to get out of Shanghai and explore the countryside. We saw a picture in a magazine of a small water town about 2 hours away by bus. So we headed to the picture! There were no details about this place in the guidebooks and very few online, which made it even more appealing. It wasn't a holiday weekend, but we had a half day on Friday after proctoring midterm exams. Stephanie and I went to the bus station and had no problems buying tickets. The travel productions are becoming more and more seamless, and our travel Chinese is really improving! It was a good China-day. We booked tickets on the public bus to WuZhen. However we didn't book return tickets, because we weren't sure how long we wanted to stay, it wasn't a busy weekend, and usually hotels and hostels can do the booking for you.The sign on the seat in the bus station

Friday afternoon we got to the bus station and found our bus and made it to Wuzhen. When we got to the bus station in Wuzhen, there were about 20 rickshaw divers banging down the door of our bus to take us somewhere. They were so overwhelming and in our faces that we decided to walk. We wandered around looking for our picture and were getting pretty disappointed after about 30 minutes of walking through pretty shabby towns. Then we saw a gated park.

Some really random display that we couldn't decipher in the ferry station.

A typical Chinese pose that I copied off a lady.

The town was clearly a retreat for the wealthy Chinese, because you had to pay 80 RMB ($11) to enter and they took you on a ferry across the water to the town. Then at night they closed off the park to the public and no vehicles or bikes were permitted. We found a really nice hotel in the town and went to dinner.

We quickly found out no one in the town spoke English and we were the only wei guo ren (quiz from the last post...what does it mean?), which made it a great exercise in Chinese. At dinner we ordered by walking up to tables, pointing at people's food and saying, Hao chi ma? (Good food?) We noticed that every table had a bean looking dish. So in an attempt to maximize our cultural experience, we ordered them. What we got was a pile of about 150 field snails! They were good, but we could each only eat about 20 of them.

ymm...snails!

After dinner we walked around at night. It was really beautiful, however a little off. The area had clearly been constructed with the intention of looking old, but in actuality the area couldn't have been built more than 40 years ago. The area had a very artificial feeling.

It's too bad you can't really see the night shots. It was gorgeous at night!

The next morning we got up and found out the buses only left for Shanghai at 6:40 am and 12:40pm, so we decided to stay another day. However, our hotel told us there were no rooms available for Saturday night, and that they could not reserve bus tickets for us. So we walked around looking for hotel vacancy without any luck. We finally found an empty youth hostel with 20 person rooms separated by gender. It was cheaper to spend the night there than it was to get into the park, so we booked it. However, later that night, our hotel had vacant rooms, so we chose the luxury option instead.

We spent Saturday sitting by the water in the sun reading books and people watching. It was so beautiful and very relaxing. Jeremy wanted to plan ahead and buy bus tickets that night, so he left to go on an adventure. When he got to the bus station, he found out both buses to Shanghai were sold out! So we came up with the plan to take a bus to Hong Zhou, a larger town close to Wuzhen, and then take the train from Hong Zhou to Shanghai. So Jeremy booked those tickets.

Some pics from Wuzhen:

We found a fake soy sauce distillery. A long time ago two brothers settled here and made soy sauce, so they recreated this museum and distillery. This is where we learned about the field snails we ate the night before.
There was also silk harvesting in this town. This women was pulling out the silk from the worm's cocoon by hand.
She would rap about 10 cocoons around her hand and stretch them out inside the water and hang them up to dry in the sun. She was really nice, and gave me a thread of silk from the worm.
Down the alley from where she was, there was women using machines to harvest the silk from the cocoons.
You can see the little cocoons in the barrel in the water, and the threads are being wrapped around the wheel. She is peddling the wheel with her foot like a sewing machine.
Some random parade that went through town about 3 times while we were there. There final act was in front of the pagoda where we were sitting.

More interesting food we got by pointing. This was chopped up duck on noodles.

the rickshaw back to the bus station

The next morning we woke up optimistic and unsure about our elaborate scheme to get home. We found some rickshaws to take us to the bus station. Stephanie and I got in an electric bike rickshaw, so we made much better time than Jeremy's guy that was pumping hard up hills. When Stephanie and I got to the bus station, we saw a lot of dilapidated buses that looked like over sized vans from the cultural revolution. Ticket salesmen were shouting their destinations, and I asked if there was one going to Shanghai, and he pointed me to his friend. I assumed it was an underground system that may be cheaper and a little more dangerous, but would take us directly to Shanghai. However, Jeremy still had our tickets and his rickshaw had yet to arrive. When he arrived, I introduced him my new friend and our new idea. After a lot of yelling, broken Chinese, and pantomiming we got on a bus. When I got on, I asked the driver where this bus was going and he said something that was not Shanghai, we didn't want to get back on the bus. Then someone who had been really helpful, was like just trust me you will get to Shanghai, we just have to stop there first. (Sounds safe right? It actually sounds much less safe telling it now then when we were there). So we get on this bus, they charged us 4RMB and keep stopping to pick people up. Based on this, we figured out that we were on a local city bus. Then we arrived at a larger bus station, where the helpful man pointed us to the long distance buses. We had bought a ticket from another town to Shanghai. So we ended up taking the local bus to the out of town bus station, where they still had tickets available to Shanghai. Our Chinese is good enough to understand the gist of what is going on, but the specific details are difficult to grasp. However, as the trip unfolded, it made complete sense. Everything worked out smoothly and we made it home without having to go out of our way! It was quite a language adventure!