When I was in Hangzhou, I went for a nice massage (not the happy ending kind).
After the massage there was an awkward moment where she started pointing to her mouth and making dodgy noises. I couldn’t understand what she was saying in Mandarin, but then she tried Cantonese and I got it. She was asking if I wanted anything to eat.
I turned down her kind offer and she then offered me cupping. The price seemed reasonable, and I’d heard about it before so I thought why not give it a shot.
Here is the result:
I can safely say I WONT be doing that again. I thought it was a bit painful when she put them on and it started sucking my skin up into the cup. The process of removing them was something completely different. Only thing I could liken it to is having a plaster the size of your palm ripped off, repeatedly.
If, however, you enjoy pain and are happy to pay a reasonable price to receive it then I believe this is perfect for you. 
We flew to Hangzhou within hours of finishing our exam marking and handing in our final grades for our classes. We’d have liked to get train tickets, but with 200 million Chinese people using the trains to get home for Spring Festival they were sold out well in advance.
We arrived at the West Lake Youth Hostel on the South East corner of the famous West Lake. It was 1am, but we were happy to see Frank waiting at the reception to greet us. He was smiling as ever and his english had clearly improved a lot since the last time we saw him in March.
The scenery in Hangzhou was as pretty as ever, but there were about 5 times as many tourists as we’d ever seen. I think this was because the weather was quite mild for winter. The last time we were there in January there was a foot of snow on everything, this time I hardly wore my jacket.
One of the less plesent changes was the onward march of Chinese Development which meant for the first time in 4 visits the lake area had smog from the nearby city. There was a noticable increase in traffic as well.
Without trying to sound too much like an aging hippy reminiscing about how good Thailand was before it was “discovered”, I have to say Hangzhou was better before the massive increase in development and is a lot more relaxed with less tourists around.
Quynh was ill with a stomach bug for a few days, so I spent a lot of time showing Bill (our American teaching colleague and co-traveller) around the sights. I did some shopping too and managed to find clothes that fit me which is quite a task in China.
We enjoyed staying in the West Lake Hostel again, it remains one of our favourite places we’ve stayed in. If anyone is heading that way make sure you look it up.
Now off to Kuala Lumpur for some hot weather.
Having failed to find a cheap replacement for my jacket we headed back to Hangzhou to pick it up from the airport lost and found. That evening we headed back to the Eastern Venice Sauna for another relaxing pampering. We only planned to stay one night but as we like Hangzhou so much we decided to stay another.
On the second day we got chatting to some other travellers (two brit girls and a german guy). After drinking the hostel dry of TsingTao we all decided to go for a quick drink in a bar. At 7am we returned from a fairly heavy night of drinking and clubbing. I took a few shots of video in the club before being asked to stop:
A couple of hours sleep and we were at the train station to catch a train to our next stop.
Luckily the awesome city of Hangzhou was close enough to get to by trains that were still operating.
We arrived to find it under a foot of snow, cars were stuck in the snow and ice on the roads and after an hour of looking for a cab we stopped for some lunch. After lunch we managed to pick up a cab and made our way to the hostel.
Hangzhou is famous for it’s large lake and it’s Dragon Well tea. Whilst here we took a walk around the lake and took a 15 mile walk into the hills to one of the temples and up to the Dragon Well village. We relaxed the rest of the time, something very easy to do in this city especially at the Eastern Venice Sauna where after your relaxing time in the hot baths and sauna you can lounge on big comfy chairs watching movies whilst you have your feet massaged.
