On the last day of our trip, we started off with a cruise of West Lake, the place we had walked to the night before in the rain. It was a very foggy and hazy day because of the rain, which was a little disappointing for sightseeing, but also made for some cool pictures. The cruise took about 45 minutes and we were able to go to the top of the boat and look out and also walk to the front. We were some of the small crowd that decided to do this in the cold- a lot of people were tired and cranky from our early starts. After we got off the boat, we walked through the gardens that were by the lake which were beautiful, "like oil painting" as our tour guide explained it. We even saw a peacock enclosure, after much confusion with our tour guide mixing up crocodiles and peacocks-an honest mistake.
The boat we were all jealous of.. ours was much smaller and less exciting.
The token Titanic picture
Another tour group with bright orange hats- it's definitely more necessary for a Chinese tour group than for 40 American students
Us in the garden area
A Chinese crocodile =]
After leaving the garden area, we attempted to go to a temple, but upon arrival, we found out that it was closed to tourists because it was getting too crowded with people praying for New Years, so we went to a pagoda instead. It looked just about like every other pagoda we've seen so far, but it was cool to walk up it.
Six Harmonies Pagoda
There are few men confident enough to wear this in public
For our last stop of the trip, we went to a tea farm in the area where they showed us what tea bushes looked like and we went to a tasting. I'm not fond of tea myself, especially the kind that is just leaves in boiling water, so I watched and learned about tea while everyone else enjoyed some. We were two of very few people that didn't get suckered into buying one, even after the lady threw in the "buy two get one free" deal on cans of their tea leaves. Everyone was very excited about buying the leaves from the source, but didn't seem to realize that it was the same tea you could buy anywhere else, just more expensive.
Trying to look happy about being at the tea farm
Close up of tea leaves
One of the women demonstrating how to pour water into the tea.
After the tea farm, we headed to lunch (at 2pm, you can imagine how people were feeling by then) and then back to Shanghai. It was a great trip overall and we got to see a lot of different areas of each city and learn more about them than we would have if we had gone without the tour guide.
Now, we are back at the Shanghai campus until Saturday when we will move to Minhang (about a 45 min drive) where we will spend the rest of the semester. A lot of people are leaving on their Spring Break trips already (we have no classes until Feb 25th), so that leaves just over half of us to move everyone into the dorms this weekend. Stay tuned for how that goes and then for our own Spring Break trip stories after that. We leave on Sunday for a 6 day trip to Pingyao, an ancient walled city and Xi'an, where the Terracotta Warriors are.
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