In the CBD

A sign above the road near our hotel

In the Central Business District of Hangzhou (a city whose population is approaching 10 million) where we were staying, the authorities seem to like translating signs into English, even the admonitory ones, although we wondered how many of the population could read the language. We couldn't read theirs. It was an astonishing part of town altogether. The spherical hotel (first opened less than a year ago) seems to have been one of the first buildings to go up in a recent wasteland that had been transformed with a network of elaborate gardens and crisscrossed with empty 6-lane roads / cycle tracks / footpaths / tunnels before any vertical construction had begun. Opposite the sun-like hotel a crescent moon shaped Grand Theatre has just opened with a pool like the stage of an amphitheatre in front of it. And now the skyscrapers have begun to spring up around these central structures like mushrooms, with the shi min zhong xin (civic centre? city hall?) on the western side, like an otherworldly space station. Between the aforementioned buildings is a sculpture garden more extensive than the one we saw in central Washington.

Shi min zhong xin beyond the sculpture garden

The construction work continues 24 hours a day, so that at night you still hear the thwack of the pile drivers, the clanging of metal on metal and see the sparks cascading like fountains from the arc welding high overhead. Construction sites glow eerily under the floodlights in the mist, and by day you can see the extent of them, with their blue roofed, prefabricated, three storey huts for the migrant workers and their muddy thoroughfares.

Typical construction site in the CBD (photo taken from the MixC mall)

May 23rd, Sunday

A corner of the CBD gardens, seen from our window

We rested, mostly, with a couple of walks in between, exploring the landscaped gardens along the Qiantang from the base of our hotel to the MixC shopping mall (that had only been opened a month previously) and back and then in another direction towards a more chaotic, older part of town where the clothes markets (fúzhuāng shìchǎng) are, under the motorway flyover. What a contrast. There were street vendors everywhere selling pancakes, fruit and clothes, and workers lugging heavy bales of material or garbage on their bikes, all wrapped in sheets of plastic. The department stores had plastic curtains in their doorways. At a hole-in-the-wall eating place a waiter took us into a tiny, windowless side room that vibrated from the traffic and served us a bowl of uncooked, chopped cilantro leaves, strewn with tiny, salty shrimps. Worried that it had been washed in contaminated water, we hardly touched it. Chris didn't touch the chicken either, which was all bones. Asking for Cola he got Sprite instead and we picked at some noodles with strips of tofu and gelatinous mushrooms.

Bridge across the Qiantang, also seen from our window

Supper, after Chris had been working hard on the slides for his first presentation at work the following day, was rather different. We were driven to the exclusive Club Golden Bund in the Binjiang district across the river, crossing the suspension bridge to share a meal in a private room with three young Chinese gentlemen, Andy (whom I mentioned in the last post), Howard and Henrry (sic.)––not their real names––clearly proud of being pioneers in their field of work. In most cases, the generation before them hadn't been allowed a university education, élitism having been frowned upon in those days. So a "grey beard" software engineer like Chris in their midst is considered a great novelty.

Shark fin soup again, as well as a clear soup, plus that Mandarin fish in sweet and sour sauce, with chicken, beef, duck, lotus root stuffed with sticky rice and a formidable number of other dishes. It's just as well I can't eat so fast using chopsticks.