We are learning the restaurants around town, and finding cafeterias with really good and really cheap food. There are also many Western restaurants with familiar comfort cuisine from home, and lots of coffee shops that would give Big Bear (i.e. a cafe with delicious coffee in DC) a run for its money. Hangzhou is actually an amazing college town, and I'm grateful for that.
What I'm not grateful for, however, is the taxi situation here. Firstly, the drivers apparently have a shift change of four hours (2-6pm). Secondly, the drivers are paid much less here than drivers in Beijing or Shanghai, yet the demands, schedule, and rigor of their job is the same. Thirdly, their pay has not risen with the increased cost of gas. Understandably, many of the drivers went on strike shortly before we arrived here, and now there is a dire shortage of cabs in a city of 6 million people and no Metro system (the first Metro line is supposed to open in a few months, but that doesn't help us for now).
We didn't know any of this when we set out yesterday afternoon to get our residence permit. We had pretty good luck flagging down a taxi around 1:30pm to head to the permit bureau on the other side of town. First, though, a little bit of background on this permit: two days ago, our university of 3,000 international students gave all of us the paperwork we would need for the permit (after threatening repeatedly the need to get said permit ASAP). Guess what these 3,000 students (including us) are all doing now? You guessed it! Mobbing the building where we have to get this oh-so-important bureaucratic prize. It is only laughable now how outrageous the bureau was when we arrived. Queuing is still a foreign concept here (despite attempts before the 2008 Olympics to introduce people to it), so we were shoved into a crowd of people screaming in Chinese, completely unaware of what was happening. When we were finally pushed into the building, some thoughtful bilingual person finally informed us that the bureau (3 hours before closing) was no longer accepting any more applications. So we pushed, shoved, and elbowed our way back onto the street.
Epic fail on the permit front. We decided to redeem the situation by walking to the nearby shopping district of Hafeng Street. Hafeng is a lovely area with many shops touting Hangzhou's famous silk, fans, tea, and most importantly, scissors :). We strolled the pedestrian walkways, got a nice tea, and I bought a new purse made from a local fabric. So success on the shopping front.
At 4pm, we wanted to head back to our campus. We started trying to flag down a taxi. No luck--they were all full. Around 4:20pm, one finally stopped to drop someone off. Three different groups of people pounced on it, begging to get in. We were not the lucky group. At 4:40pm, discouraged and shellshocked, we started walking towards campus. At 4:45pm, someone at a building on the corner we happened to pass decided it would be fun to show off their chest-shaking collection of fireworks and firecrackers. At 5pm, we called someone from campus to ask which bus to take back. At 6:30pm, we stumbled back into our dorm room, dripping with sweat. What is normally a 20 minute taxi ride took 2.5 hours.
Sadly, our traversing across the city for the day was not over. We were meeting some friends-of-friends for the first time at a hotel bar nearby. We had about 5 minutes to clean up, change clothes, and shove some peanuts into our mouths for dinner. We hoped maybe we'd have better luck catching a taxi this time. Nope. After their four hour shift change, all the drivers want to grab dinner. About 20 minutes later, one cab finally stopped in front of us to let someone out. We ran to it and jumped in. The driver (guessing correctly that we can't speak Chinese yet) pantomimed he wanted dinner. We pantomimed the "PLEASE, PLEASE, PRETTY PLEASE?!" gesture. We must have looked pathetic and sweaty enough that he agreed to drive us to the hotel bar. We finally arrived, late and disgusting (after already cleaning up once), but at least we arrived.
Last taxi story: we needed one final taxi to get us from the bar back home. We had a lovely time meeting our new friend, and fortunately, the hotel called a taxi for us. We got in, and had to wait at the hotel gate to be let onto the street. A woman rushed the cab (with us in it), and knocked on the cab window. While we couldn't understand all of their conversation in Mandarin, I'm almost positive she offered him 100RMB (5x more than the typical fare) if he'd kick us out and take her instead. I'm glad the gate raised shortly thereafter, and for whatever reason the driver decided not to kick us out. Thank. Goodness. Lesson I've learned? We need to learn the bus routes and bikeshare system here ASAP!
Wow, this blog is already quite long. I haven't even mentioned that my day started with sour milk (seriously--the boxed milk I had yesterday morning had gone sour, and I only discovered this after I took a gulp). I won't spend too long on the "trollers" aspect, except to say that there is a distinct class of white guys around here who apparently think their luck on the lady front will be better in Asia than in their home country. You can imagine what kind of guy this is (read: SKETCHY), but I am humbled that it was just such a guy who acted as our translator at the bureau earlier that day. I guess trollers can be nice too, despite whatever less-than-noble intentions they may have in coming to Asia. Lesson learned: don't judge a troller by his cover. Or do? Okay, no lesson learned here :).
That's it for now. I better go get a bus route map here, and I'll enjoy my (not-sour) coffee today. :)