We were up early to catch the boat to tour lake Qiandao. The lake is full of islands, and of course we visited a few. Each island was basically a small natural area park where you could walk around see the lake. We had lunch on the boat and then went back to town to depart for Hangzhou.
View of Qiandao Lake
Hangzhou is a big city, I’d guess around 4 million people live there. A large river, the Qian Tang runs through part of it. We are working are way to Shanghai to meet with professors at Shanghai Fisheries University. But after traveling through eastern China for about week now, you are constantly amazed at the pace of life here, the new construction, big modern buildings going up everywhere, the diversity of the food, each town has its own dishes, you never see the same dishes served again and again, some similarities yes, but always a bit different from place to place. The roads are new and very broad and spacious, and with greenery everywhere, shrubs, trees and and flowers all along the roadways. Even in the small towns you see the same sorts of things, new homes, road construction, etc.
People heading to work in Hangzhou
You get the sense that Chinese people are used to big changes. For example, a few years back the country converted over to using the electric scooter versus the gas powered scooter to cut down on air pollution and noise in the cities. This change happened quickly. Many of the old neighborhoods in the cities are being razed, torn down and new very modern buildings and entire neighborhoods take their place. You get the sense that whatever old China was, it will quickly be gone, at least here in the east. We will visit Shanghai Fisheries University tomorrow, but as another example, they moved the entire campus to the outskirts of Shanghai because the old campus was not big enough. They just built a new campus to educate and house 40,000 students to study fisheries, the oceans, aquaculture, etc. Imagine that…an entire University dedicated to fisheries.
Jess
The days photos can be found at:
What a great experience and seeing a university that specializes in fisheries is amazing. Obviously their gov’t moves with speed when they want to accomplish something. I am enjoying the blog. Be safe and say hi to everyone.
Steve