China trip

After flying from Seattle to Beijing and then go Shanghai we drove about an hour and half south to Hangzhou in the middle of the night. These photos are from the next day. We stayed a Hyatt hotel (rated 5 star) which was across the street from a road that wrapped around West Lake lake. Around the corner from the hotel was a familiar site of a Starbucks and Häagen-Dazs. Around the corner from that was a mall that included a Toys R Us. Across the street was every fancy store you see in a major city or in Vegas like Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Dior, Hermes, etc. We went to lunch at one of the oldest restaurants in town which had been serving food since 1848. On the drive there I noticed that within three blocks was a Ferrari, Lotus, Porsche, Lamborghini, and other nice car dealerships. We next took a boat from one one the many locations around the lake out to the island which was really an island with a few pools in the middle. Lots of cool stuff to see on the island. Fish swimming in the pool. An interesting black sticky rice that was sweat tasting as a snack from a store. We got these interesting whistles that sounded like a native bird. You could see many pagodas near the lake. Walking to another point on the island we were able to take a boat that took us back to almost across the street from the hotel. I noticed a statue from a memorial in the war between Japan and China.