We spend the last days in Shanghai just wandering around the city center, checking out the stores in the French Concession and the skyline of the Bund. We didn’t really do much in Shanghai in the sense of seeing places – more just went with the flow, which was a very nice change. The only museum or site we visited was the Museum of Contemporary Art.
From Shanghai we took the very modern and fast fast-train to Hangzhou (180 km. in 80 minutes), described by Marco Polo as "beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world." The city has a total population over six million people and circles around it main attraction the West Lake.
We spent today biking around the West Lake. The lake is surrounded by a very beautiful park with decorated gardens of the finest sort. We can certainly accept Polo’s description of Hangzhou but we’re also sure that he came when the sun was shining and the mist/smog was a lot less then it was today.
The weather gods is still not nice enough to us. Even though the temperature hovers around 20°C it feels very cold – nothing like Icelandic 20 degrees. Only Shanghai was warm enough but a bit too wet. We are hoping that spring is just around the corner here in China.
Tomorrow we will take the bus towards Beijing again. We will make one stop on the way though and visit the city of Nanjing.
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