5 May 2018
Complete waste of a day
The modern malls of Hangzhou
As you shall soon see, it is raining, it is really raining a lot, it is raining so much that I cant even walk around in the street because its all just deep puddles.
Despite my ongoing attempts to completely expel both lungs through coughing fits, I had plans today. I planned to climb some of those hills over the back of the lake. I now wont get to do that. I still get to cough a lot, but I dont get to cough n' climb, just cough n' whine.
Since tomorrow I am going to Shanghai, I now wont ever get to see if you can climb along those hills, I believe you can, I guess I will have to come back again another time, get a cold again, another cold that has now lasted 9 days, hooray.
Can I put a sick leave form in for the days I was sick on my holiday? I used to know someone who did that, he got fired for doing it, true story.
Back to the rain rant, a few times I thought it would stop, only to find it was raining harder, right now out my window I can see a whiter bit of grey sky, but I wont be fooled, its going to rain for the rest of time.
Yes, its raining. I sat and drank two expensive coffees at the expensive cafe thinking it would stop. It didnt.
Instead I scrolled the map and found the furthest mall on the subway line, because what else can I do in the rain? As it turns out, this is the mall I went to last time I was here, only that time I had to go on a long dark bus trip through the remote ghost town suburbs which were all under contruction back then.
There is an ice skating rink, and small Chinese babies are very good at ice skating, I saw a quintuple lutz to double axel.
As you can see, this area is no longer a ghost town, it is the new modern city centre.
The mall has a very nice roof garden area to get wet in while taking photos of the view. The cleaners who rake leaves all day were standing under shelter making fun of me for getting wet.
Once I had walked around indoors enough, I descended back to the subway and found a food stand selling 5 mystery balls of mystery meat for $2. They were quite nice, each one had a different mysterious filling of grey boiled flesh. Fittingly grey and moist.