Hangzhou. Marco Polo considered the city, “beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world.” Many artists and poets have lived and worked in this inspirational city…

So, after four hours of sleep, Sara and I caught a bullet train to see what it was all about.

O-M-G it’s mad early and I don’t know why we have chosen this ridiculous hour to start a day trip. Nevertheless, we trudge along with the masses….

I swear, as we’re walking out of the train station it starts raining… we decide to half the day and check out the touristy portion, West Lake.

Sara can’t quite stay awake so she bolts for a Starbucks while I hang around the lake for photos.

After some time, we meet again and decide it’s time for lunch. After much interneting and discussion with some police officers, we chose a hole in the wall/mom and pop restaurant for the local cuisine: Beggar’s Chicken, which is wrapped in fresh lotus leaves and baked on fir.

^it was AMAAAAAZING. and we headed to a Taiwanese cafe afterwards for drinks and dessert to wrap up the binge eating.

After we satiated our appetites we still had a couple of hours before our train so we checked out the China Academy of Art.

Where there were copious table tennis tables.

After scoping out the campus directory…

We checked out the illustration studio

Where students were working on a “quit smoking” campaign for the city:

Students in the sculpture studio

Were busting these out:

We then found ourselves in the gallery, where we had to sign in:

and were informed of some rules:

Painting #1

Painting #2

Painting #3

^which summed up what we wanted to do…

We wandered around some more, tried to find a donut shop, stopped at a bao-ze shop, bought souvenir foods for our offices, and then bolted for the train to grab some glorious nap time.

We finished the night by trying out a Chinese Pizza Hut. All Pizza Huts in China are MAD SWANKY…. and have ridiculous flavors: