After the Storm

Ok, so I've never been in a tropical storm of any kind, so the recent typhoon kind of threw me for a loop. I was trapped in my room most of the day, which gave me WAY too much time inside my own head. But it cleared overnight, and the next day Carol's family invited me to go with them to Hangzhou, a couple of hours away from Shanghai by car. In the morning all the streets in Shanghai were flooded - and so was the taxi I took to get to their house.

"Hey, siji, you have a small lake back here," I told the taxi driver in Chinese, but only after I'd accidentally stuck both of my tennis shoes ankle-deep into the puddle in the back seat of the car. The driver, his only response was to turn around and say, "a lake" in English, and then give me a proud grin. We ended up practicing our English for the entire 45-minute ride to Gubei.

Shanghai truly was a mess. Half the trees at Carol's apartment complex had been uprooted by the wind, and an uncomfortably large part of the city was under at least two feet of water. We actually saw people wading knee-deep in the water, using old bicycle baskets to fish in the streets. In the middle of the city. And they were catching things. I'm not making this up.



But the storm had benefits other than providing me with my humorous anecdotes for the weekend. In Hangzhou, Carol's mother's friend told us it was the clearest day she'd ever seen in the city. It was cool and the air was blessedly clean, a welcome retreat from the hot filth of the city. I love Shanghai, and it's ever so much cleaner than Beijing, but I can still wipe my face three times a day and come away with a black handkerchief every time. Hangzhou kind of reminded me of Seattle, only a little richer - yes, I can't believe it either - and a little more Chinese, obviously. But just a little, which may or may not be sad depending on your opinion on China's recent boom in development.

But either way, Hangzhou was truly beautiful. The Chinese have a saying: in heaven there is paradise, on earth there is Hangzhou and Suzhou. I haven't been to Suzhou yet - I'm working on that one - but I can definitely see where they would get that idea. The lake there is amazing. Carol and I took a boat out onto the water and just relaxed for an hour. Could be the first time I've relaxed like that all summer, to be perfectly honest. I mean, I love my yoga, but there's really nothing like an hour in a rickety old traditional Chinese boat on a traditional Chinese lake (even if it is in a no longer-so-traditional Chinese town) to loosen you up.

Carol and I also made an attempt to feed our fast car habit by visiting the luxury car dealerships which seemed to be all over the place in Hangzhou. I got to sit in the front seat of my beloved Porsche 911 Turbo, Carol tried out a Ferrarri Scaglietti. Once again we drew confused looks from the male salesmen, who I think were utterly confused by two girls so completely into race cars. But we figured it was probably the closest either of us would get to our dream cars for a long time, so we decided to swallow our pride.

Monday saw me back at school, where my classes are getting less and less organized and more and more frustrating. They moved us up a level after the first month, so we're reading long, academic essays on things that should be much harder to wax academic about: fashion trends in Shanghai, Shanghainese food, etc. etc. The lessons are far too long and complicated, with way too much new vocabulary every day, for it to be possible to completely prepare even if one were to spend every moment of her time studying. Which one is becoming less and less inclined to do, because one is getting very overwhelmed and slightly fed up.