Chapter from the book "23 Reasons to Fall in Love with Hangzhou", written by Natasa Vujicic
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Hangzhou is a big city with elevated roads, underwater tunnels, and other ways to make my life difficult when it comes to orientation. In the best of times, even with single-story surroundings, I have trouble finding my way. So, yes, it took me a while to map my way around Hangzhou.
For several months after we first arrived, we were frequently driving the Zhonghe Elevated Road (中河高架路) to reach different destinations. Every single time I was trying to imagine what lay below. I was able to see the tips of the tea hills, with white houses scattered here and there. Once we would leave the tea hills behind, I could see the top of a gorgeous pagoda, followed by a cross on top of a Christian church. It was almost like torture: I could see there was something magnificent hidden below, but I couldn’t see what it was.
The mysteries of street level remained unsolved, simply because I didn’t know how to get there on foot. It looked like tea hills and it looked like downtown, but I couldn’t connect the dots on the map. Of course I asked my husband, and of course he explained many times that this was the area around Hefang Street, but I didn’t believe his explanation. I knew Hefang Street, I went there many times on foot, and I knew well that the footpath actually took you in a completely opposite direction.
After a while, I decided to ask my husband to visit this area together. So we did. He was, as usually, right. That was the area around Hefang Street, Zhongshan South Road (中山南路), only approached from a different direction. Once there, we got stuck trying to find a parking place, managing to upset a few locals unused to seeing a big car navigating a narrow alley. We also drew some confused looks when we tried to decide whether to carry the stroller up the stairs at the end of one of the alleys (no, we didn’t; the stairs were leading up to the mountain).
We watched the ladies (大妈) dance in the Taimiao Square (太庙广场) and browsed Chayuanqian Wet Market (察院前农贸市场) at the back. It was the first time I understood how very different the products sold at the wet market in China are from those sold back home. You couldn’t find any kind of cheese, but there was an enormous choice of leafy green vegetables, fish, and seafood. The smallest dried shrimps I have ever seen were kept in piles; sea cucumbers were stored in luxury boxes. Live eels (I hope those were eels) were swimming in buckets of water. Even after more than a year in China, I had no idea how to cook—or even name—most of the ingredients that were casually lying in the stalls. All of it was unfamiliar, and tremendously exciting.
We bought some chestnuts (peeled!) and continued through the very local Dama Lane (大马弄), passed a stall where a man was categorizing crabs that were crawling in all directions. The next stall was selling dried chicken and duck, then came fresh mandarin oranges and yellow pomelos. Further down the road were more street stalls selling all kinds of food, such as 500-gram zongzi that you could buy for just 6 to 12 yuan.
Soon enough, we emerged to the sight of the pretty temple and the church I had seen “from above”. The temple turned out to be Wangxian Pavilion (望仙阁). The church, Gulou Church (鼓楼堂), was located behind the Drum Tower (鼓楼). After some time admiring, taking photos, gesturing, and gasping, when even the street vendors had stopped laughing at me, my family was allowed to search for lunch. Luckily enough, the nearby Shiwukui Alley (十五奎巷) hosted a few restaurants, all of which served decent local food.
Our food was delicious; it was only missing some soy sauce. Of course I was delegated the task of asking for it, so I used my best Chinese to clearly ask for an email (you jian, 邮件) instead of soy sauce (jiang you, 酱油). By the puzzled look of the waitress and a few heads popping up and turning to stare at me, I could see that something was not going as planned, so I asked again. To my rescue came a young man who addressed the waitress without even looking up from his plate.
The waitress brought the soy sauce, slammed it on a table, and quietly said something that sounded suspiciously like bendan - “stupid” (笨蛋). We laughed until we cried at both the puzzlement of the guests and the audacious comment of the waitress. But funniest of all was the reaction of the unfazed young man. On our way out, we thanked him one more time, but again, he hardly seemed to acknowledge us. I had a feeling that he didn’t really want to appear particularly helpful, but simply to shut up the loud foreigner asking dumb questions.
And that was, in short, why I fell so head over heels for China. It was different. It was weird and shocking, could be unbearably noisy and overwhelming, too fast, too smelly, too crowded, too difficult to understand, and absolutely breathtaking and spectacular. Most remarkably, good or bad, it was incredibly practical, very “let’s just get this over with and move on.” No one seemed to get particularly excited about anything and yet, for us, the mere experience of living daily life in China was exhilarating.
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