my garden has two, three grasses tops

another weekend, another wild trip to the chinese countryside to go hiking. this time the hiking was preceded by a morning in shaoxing, a sizable, pleasant, and largely boring city about an hour away from hangzhou that, as mentioned earlier, is the hometown of lu xun. we went to the "lu xun historic district" and walked around. this is a restored area that was where lu xun lived when he lived in shaoxing, and provided the inspiration for some of his stories. among the attractions are his former residence, a lu xun museum, his ancestral family home, the school where he taught, and the place where he used to go to drink huang jiu, or yellow wine. the stuff isn't bad, i didn't drink any while i was there, but my roommate had previously bought me a shaoxing huang jiu sampler set. the expensive stuff has a sweet taste, and is similar to an apertif, according to one of my friends. the weather was brutally hot and humid there.

below is a picture i took of the canal alongside the restored street. and below that is a picture of the hundred grasses garden, about which lu xun wrote something like "behind my house is a garden, and while in it is only grass, to me it is paradise." i don't know about that, but the garden is behind his house, and there is a lot of grass.

finally, a picture of me sharing a bowl of huang jiu and beer nuts with a statue of kong yiji, one of lu xun's more famous characters.

after lunch we hopped on the bus for the trip out to the mountains, during which i slept. when i awoke i found that all the humidity in the air was falling right on top of us, but after about ten minutes the rain let up and we started our incursion into the scenic area. the first step was a boat ride across a resevoir, which was great fun as the boats were piloted by guys who clearly got great pleasure driving little speed boats back and forth across the lake as fast as possible. at the other end we hopped into litle electric cars for a ride up the valley, after which we finally started hiking. here is a rather crappy view of the valley that we walked up.

the goal of the trip was to head to these small pools in the stream where we could go swimming. the weather was still so hot and humid that we practically soaking by the time we got there anyway. but the swimming was great fun. a few chinese tourists passed by and looked at us like we were crazy, which is pretty much the same look we get when we do anything. the ride back was fairly eneventful.

just about all of our roommates and students at school have gone home this week for the international labor day holiday, so it's gonna be pretty damn quite around here, though the tourists at west lake should be ridiculous. that's it for now.