A fortnight in the Orient.

     Last month, I spent a fortnight in China's Zhejiang province, visiting my girlfriend who has been studying there for the better part of a year. There's a saying in China, which translates roughly as 'above is Heaven, below is Hangzhou' and it isn't difficult to see how it might have originated. Zhejiang's capital city is renowned for its beauty throughout China; a prosperous city sprawled laconically around the picturesque West Lake and surround by dreamy, mist - shrouded hills. I've always been a bit of a country boy and tend to feel nervous and claustrophobic in cities, so it was a relief to have fresh air and green spaces within easy reach. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to adjust at first. The City itself has a population of 3.9 million, relatively small by Chinese standards, but still, preposterously, almost four times as populous as Birmingham. To make matters worse, I was visiting during China's annual Dragon Boat Festival, so the region was bloated with domestic tourists. I had to keep reminding myself that I was in a different continent to my own, and to make a conscious effort to assimilate into a drastically different culture. 

     To an outsider, in particular an Englishman, China's cultural nuances can be very difficult to come to terms with. Chinese commuters will think nothing of jostling and pushing to the front of a bus queue or through the doors of a train, and that came as a bit of a shock to my delicate English sensibilities. Worse, though, was their unabashed fascination with Westerners. At first I found the attention novel and flattering; I spent the first three days or so swanning around in my sunglasses being photographed and pretending I was someone important. Very quickly, though, it became wearing. It's one thing to be the focus of peoples' attention in a small, parochial village, but quite another when you're in an enormous, multicultural city  and people are taking pictures of you with their iPhones. It isn't so bad as to be intimidating, but it's certainly invasive. That said, I found that people were uniformly friendly and welcoming; I never felt uneasy as I have in some European cities. Shops stay open later in China, and as a result you'll see families out and about late into the evening. The streets aren't solely the domain of drunks after 11pm as you'd find in the U.K; it's very refreshing to see.

     Unfortunately, I'm not in any position to give a purely unbiased view of Zhejiangese cuisine; being a vegetarian meant that my options were distinctly limited. My Chinese is so terrible as to be borderline offensive, so I was left to sit and smile inanely in restaurants as my girlfriend explained that 'he's a vegetarian... that means he doesn't eat meat' and that 'no, he isn't a monk, he's my boyfriend.' It turns out that a great deal of the flavour in Zhejiang's food is provided by the meat; they don't have the variety and spices of Szechuan or other such regions. As a result, I found myself eating a huge amount of largely flavourless veg. I'm reluctant to admit the amount of times we resorted to eating at Pizza Hut, but if you've ever tried boiled bamboo flesh you'll understand. Zhejiangese cuisine is often described as 'fresh, tender and smooth with a mellow fragrance'; I'm afraid to say the subtleties were somewhat lost on me.

     A mere two hours away from Hangzhou is the mountain resort of Moganshan. Moganshan was a getaway for the wealthy of Shanghai during the early part of the twentieth century, with a considerable number of British and American families establishing summer homes on the cool slopes of the mountain. These wealthy families fled their homes in the late '40s with Communism on the rise, and as a result some of the houses still stand intact, eerily unoccupied and surrounded by overgrown Bamboo. One such building, undoubtedly magnificent in its day, still had shoes stacked neatly in one of the cupboards, gathering dust. It was a truly surreal and affecting sight, like stumbling across a disused film set. The mountain is easily walkable from the village below, even for someone as feeble as me, and the walk itself is beautiful, despite the abundance of insect life and the inescapable reek of rotting bamboo. Despite its relative proximity to Hangzhou, Moganshan was almost deserted at the time of our visit. We stayed in the Moganshan Natural Home Inn, a picturesque and well-appointed hostel in which we were the only guests. The contrast between the bustle of Hangzhou and the calm of the mountain was both marked and welcome.