An Chang

Completely lost in Shaoxing, the only clue Lonely Planet gave us for some respite from the city was the name of an old village about an hour away. Without any further information, we asked for some advice from the man at the desk of our hostel. He very helpfully wrote down two buses we would have to take to get to our location, An Chang Cultural Village. Since we had no idea how to ask where we were while riding the bus, it was no surprise that we got off way too early. Sometimes my mind says "oh my gosh I think this is the place we should get off and even if this is too early we can just walk in the direction of the bus and maybe we'll get there" and I should never listen. We found a local travel agent but inside, the woman behind the desk was completely unable to articulate where we should go. She understood our question in English, but she couldn't articulate a response. Instead she wrote down, in meticulous handwriting, what we should do. In English AND Chinese! Perfect! We were quickly learning that when asking for help, directions written in Chinese are worth a thousand English words.

The second bus ride was a new experience for us. We drove through ungilded China, a never-ending maze of highways and manufacturing plants and pipes-I-could-crawl-through. The bus rolled up to an intersection and all the passengers, having read our transcribed Chinese directions, scurried us off the bus and pointed across the street. We were pretty sure that they weren't leading us astray, but the direction they had pointed in seemed to lead into the middle of an abandoned factory ground. For ten minutes we walked down the streets, no sign of life except one chicken clucking us onward. And finally, we saw this:

We found it (maybe)! After the desolate streets we walked down, these decorations were actually pretty conclusive evidence that we had walked towards a village, not an abandoned factory.

Walking a little further, we saw a group of four teenagers hanging out, and given our desolate surroundings, in a country of 1.5 billion people, these four teenagers were beacons of hope. We proceeded further and further, with reserved confidence, and finally we discovered An Chang Cultural Village.

Welcome!

An Chang was a surprise after our travel through the industrial wasteland surrounding Shaoxing. We were greeted by welcome signs directing us towards the a canal, which one day may have been a real commercial street. There were several small stone footbridges across the canal, which leads me to believe that this was not a fabricated village. In addition to the locals doing their thing, making sausages, playing cards, cleaning laundry, we were confronted by a row of benches with three ladies selling hard sugar candy and dollar-store-reject toys. One of the ladies, waving her arms and pointing up to my head, successfully communicated that yes, I was very tall and yes, she was very short. It's moments like these where I feel like a true ambassador to the world.

There were also some signs pointing to a one room museum that had closed by the time we arrived, and a religious building we couldn't find, even though the entire village was just one canal street.

A local hangin' out in An Chang.

Me looking at the canal, one of the many things to do in An Chang!

Soon after we arrived on the deserted canal street, an old guy in a boat discovered us and started yelling "hello.....hello.....HELLO!" in our direction. Part of the old village vibe apparently includes guys in the Chinese version of a gondola aggressively following you around hoping you'll take a ride. We decided to walk down the canal, and then take this guy on the way back up. I try to avoid rewarding people who hassle tourists, but these boats looked cool, and there were definitely no other tourists coming that day. He also successfully told other, younger boat guys to lay off his future customers, so he might have been the senior boat guy in town. Our plan left him with an hour to call after us as we slowly strolled down the street, but he never gave up hope. We finally hopped in at the end of the road, and he took us back up the canal in full gondola style, sans the serenades.

Our relentless boatman-to-be

One side of the rowboat was paddled with his hands, and the other with his feet. Good idea!

We're pretty sure An Chang was an attempt to create a tourist attraction, and I would make fun of it, but I geniunely appreciate the money that must have gone into preserving the canal, its bridges, and the structures lining the waterfront from development and construction. This is what it looks like one hundred feet past the edge of the village:

The surrounding scenery

Despite the silly attempt at a tourist attraction, I'm glad An Chang was saved from that fate.

Shaoxing

Nate and I traveled south-east from Hangzhou by train to Shaoxing, a quiet city of 4.5 million in Zhejiang province. When Nate and I were planning where to go from Hangzhou, we had a few days to travel before we could meet up with Ian again, so we didn't want to stray too far from Shanghai. However, Lonely Planet was not being very helpful. The sad reality is that the size of a travel guide seems to be inversely proportional to its quality. With little help from Lonely Planet, we found a city that was a couple of hours by train from Hangzhou, and went for it, not sure exactly what we would find. We ended up in Shaoxing, a city about two hours by train from Hangzhou. It's a humble city of 4.5 million, and here Nate and I began to see China.

Tearing away, layer by layer, the bars, night clubs, dunkin' donuts, the bund, we left the foreigner zone and entered a city built by the Chinese for the Chinese. Not that this city was so different from the others. Shaoxing is still full of towering apartment complexes, early-morning ballroom dancing in public parks, streets saturated with mo-peds, but this city seemed to be bleeding utility and efficiency.

Shaoxing, like a lot of China, is perpetually being built

I never stop being impressed by these large, stoic squares that have welcomed me to some cities in China

And just when I thought that this was a just another modern city blooming from Chinese industrial expansion, we walked one mile east from our Hostel and encountered some architecture that felt like an old Chinese village. The skyscrapers of Shaoxiang towered in the distance, and I'm honestly not sure how much longer this village section of the city will last. It was one of the places where I would have loved to have a tour guide, or at least someone who spoke Chinese. Some villagers peeked out from their buildings and said "ni hao", but I wonder how long they had lived there and when Shaoxiang began its explosion into a metropolis. I left China with more questions than answers, and nowhere was this more evident than in Shaoxiang.

Out of nowhere, old buildings!

It took a while, but we found a pagoda on the hill. Walking up the hill, we ran into some old men who we think were telling us that the inside of the pagoda was closed, and insisted that we try some other time. When we kept on going, they looked at each other and wrinkled their eyebrows in confusion, probably thinking "those guys are wasting their time, why don't they come back tomorrow when they can see the inside of the pagoda too?"

Silenced by language, I drifted aimlessly through this city, seeing people, buildings and places without really understanding. Without any help from the guide book, we were surrounded by a city without even knowing why it existed in the first place. I had been pretty firmly attached to my guide book up until this point, and in Shaoxing I learned to put the book in my backpack and start exploring. I'm sure there were points of interest we missed - apparently a famous poet lived somewhere in the city - but we decided to take the city and make it our own.

"What kinds of industries are important in Shaoxiang? What types of people live here? Is this a city that Chinese people would visit? What is that big glass pyramid building in the middle of the town square?"
"I have no idea!"

As expected, we failed spectacularly, which is not so bad, all things considered.

Shaoxing village, with Shaoxing City looming in the background

Seriously, what is this building??