Hangzhou

Our trip to Hangzhou was a lot of fun, it was really beautiful. We climbed a pagoda, went to a Traditional Chinese Medicine museum, and my favorite part was our visit to a beautiful tea plantation. The most memorable experience, involved a restaurant where we were unfortunately unable to eat the food. It was a very Chinese lunch planned for us at a restaurant where they served us a WHOLE chicken. I kept trying to tell my friend who was digging into it while his wife cringed. I kept saying no, Todd it is the whole chicken and he was like "yeah I know and then they smashed it cuz it still has all the bones" and I said "NO it is like the ENTIRE chicken" his response: "whatever!" The reason I kept saying it is because the tiny little chicken feet were staring at me from underneath the tea leaf the whole time! It wasn't until he was digging around and got a piece of BEAK in his chopsticks that he realized what I meant. We were laughing so hard, and then handed the whole thing back to the waiter who was so confused because we literally didn't eat any of it, what a waste I know but YUCK!! We took the high speed train there and that was fun, we sat in the first class section which was really not too expensive. Unfortunately, our chicken feet ordeal was not over because the lady across the aisle from Trent and I proceeded to put on a plastic food service glove and pull out GIANT black chicken feet, slurping and sucking away on them. Ohhh China, never a dull moment. I should say that this event was followed by an hour and a half of waiting in the totally packed Hangzhou train station. We had brought a deck of playing cards and since there were no seats available I bought a newspaper and three of us sat on the floor playing cards. Trent decided to be a princess as my friend Rebecca put it and refused to sit even on top of the newspaper, so he was ready to sit down on the train needless to say!