Why it Helps to Know Locals.

Saturday 15 March, 2014 

¥3.00      Breakfast (3 Buns)
¥12.50    Coffee (Peet's 50% Off Coffee 8-10am)
¥14.60    Stationery

Total: ¥30.10 ($5.75)

Weekly Total: ¥781.20 ($148.80)

Total Spend: ¥6968.70 ($1327.35 AUD)

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So my mum found a friend of a friend who lives in Hangzhou. 

I communicated with this auntie through broken Chinese earlier this week, and we managed to organise to meet up on Saturday so she could take me around. I met her, her husband and her daughter (who is two years older than me) at uni and they took me in their car to go to He Fang Jie, a famous ''old Hangzhou style"  street for tourists. 

I told them I wanted to try stinky tofu, so we shared this 'fried' version of stinky tofu. It wasn't really well made (it didn't even smell!), and it's not the authentic one, so I'm still game to try it.

Traditional sweets - they are pounding a peanut candy. 

It has all the old historical Chinese buildings still intact. A lot of the shops sold jade, wood carvings, tea and silk ... essentially your typical Hangzhou tourist items - but my favourite store there was an old, traditional Chinese medicine centre. It was still being used to see patients, so it was quite busy, but it was the interior that blew me away - think dried herbs in giant glass bottles and tiny wooden medicine cabinets stretching up to the roof, stone floors and carved rosewood chairs, and on top of all this, people rushing in and out. I was standing stunned in the middle of it all.

After that, they shouted me to dinner (which was at the local dinner time of 5:00pm). We went to 杭州酒家, a newly refurbished restaurant specialising in Hangzhou style food. My favourite dishes were the baby bamboo stalks (apparently quite cheap and easy to make; a typical home-cooked item), and these fish balls which melted in your mouth like steamed egg. 

Hangzhou Jiu Jia is famous because it's in some old building.. or I think it's one of the earliest restaurants? I can't remember. The food was good though!

It has some pretty hip interiors.

Typical Hangzhou food - Potato strips in chilli oil (top left), deep fried tofu skin (with a mince filling?) (left), and a sweet fried pork (right). 

This is a reinvention of an old Hangzhou delicacy called 'Sole(Foot) Biscuit'.. I think it has something to do with it looking like the road because it's spotty with different seeds. 

We finished dinner around 6:30pm and walked down to XiHu (West Lake) this time from the east side of the lake. It was really busy because the weather had been amazing - think the first days of Spring sunshine - and the skies were clear and the sun was just about to set. 

Behind the scenes!

I was surprised by how much fun I had as a tourist. The family treated me so well and I was taken aback by their generosity; not only did they shout me food and spend a whole day with me, they also taught me a lot more about the local culture and the intricacies of the Chinese language (especially chengyu's).

I found myself struggling to find the right way to say ''thank you'' at the end of the day, so I had to call my mum and tell her to quickly help me write a thank you text which would express my gratitude. 

Spending the day with them definitely made me more confident in speaking Chinese, as I realised that I could communicate and understand a large portion of general conversations. I even learnt a few phrases of the local Hangzhou dialect!