First China vacation...to Hangzhou

The kids had some time off last week so we decided to take a trip outside of Shanghai.  We went to the city of Hangzhou which is about 180 km from Shanghai.  Mr.  He drove us there and it took about 3 hours, much of that time was in the cities as the highway between the cities had a speed limit of 120 kph and was wide open.  Hangzhou is famous for silk and West Lake (Xi Hu).  We stayed at the Shangri-la right next to West Lake in a very large room that could fit us and the kids comfortably as we were staying for three nights.  We quickly found that outside of Shanghai the availability of good western food is suspect at best.  We ended having only two good meals (outside of the good breakfast buffet at the hotel) the whole time we where there and that was at the same restaurant.  One of the lunches at the silk market comprised of Lay's potato chips, snickers, and soda.  We have have still not adjusted to Chinese food and here near the sea much of the menus are filled with seafood. 

(lot of pictures here...http://picasaweb.google.com/krfraser5/HangzhouChinaMarch2008)

The main attraction here is West Lake and we spent Thursday and Friday touring around the lake.  Thursday was on foot, Friday was by boat and foot.  Many beautiful and interesting sights.  The lake is one of the top tourist attractions in China.  We saw at least 7 or 8 brides in the two days we were there taking pictures by the lake.  Justin continued to be our big tourist attraction (he loves the attention!), taking pictures by request with the locals on several occasions.  Kim was popular as well with a couple of pictures with locals.  I even got one shot of the family taking a picture with some Chinese folks.  Saturday was a little rainy so we went to the silk market and spent some time swimming at the hotel.  Overall, it was a great place to visit and we plan on going back in the future to visit some of the sites that we did not have time to see.  Some pictures are shown below, but visit the link to see the cool sights and the many beautiful flowers that were all over the place.  We returned home to Shanghai on Sunday which only took 2.5 hours.  Our first trip out of town was a success!