Am a Freak!!! (Part 1)

Ok this one is long due. This I am picking from my travel journal I maintained when I went to china. Infact this was one of my first entries after landing in Hangzhou. Quite an adventurous one! Here goes.......

Date: 04, September 2005
Time: 12.30 AM
At Yang's house in Hangzhou.

So I am finally here, sitting in Yang ,my host's house, and writing this journal before hitting the bed. How I got here is one hell of an adventure story.....

I got to Shanghai airport by about seven in the morning and after finishing all the formalities at the airport (the airport authorities and the ambience of the airport is so cold and intimidating) I was out by 7.30 AM. Though I knew I had to get to the train station next, I was unsure of how to get there. Vaguely remembered the directions Divya had posted on her blog(not that it helped much, I should have come better prepared!). Anyways in the course of getting there, 2 women even tried conning me to take a taxi to I dont know where! Trying to ask for directions with several people seemed futile as neither did they understand me nor did I understand them... I even showed them a picture of a train trying to figure out where the station was!

Finally I stopped this gentleman, Mr Ding (some complete stranger) and asked him if he knew english and where the train station to Hangzhou was. The man was kind enough to tell me that the 2 girls accompanying him were also headed to Hangzhou. Call it my gutts, desperation, foolishness or whatever you will, I asked him if I could join them and he obliged! So we went down to his car, a cool BMW, and he drove us all (Lee, Xin and me) through Shanghai to the bus station. In truth, I had no clue where we were going, if he was going to drop us all the way to Hangzhou, or the train station in Shanghai, or the bus station or where! But somehow I just lt myself trust them... I know its the craziest thing to do..be in a new country where you dont speak or understand their language , directions or anything and hitch-hike with a couple of strangers....phew! what the hell was I thinking!

Anyways, thank god for me, these guys turned out to be real sweet people! We stopped for breakfast in Shanghai in this place called Bi Feng Tang (?) and that was my introduction to Chinese food. It seemed like quite a hip place and I was unsure of its charges. So I chose not to eat anything and settled to drinking some water which I thought came free like in any other restuarant back in India! well, I figured later on that chinese drink tea (which was pretty good) with their food like the way we drink water, and water cost some money! After breakfast, Mr. Ding dropped us off at the bus station and believe it or not he even paid for my bus ticket!!!! Were these people nice or what! I felt quite uncomfortable about the whole thing, insisted that I would pay up for my ticket but he wouldn't budge. So in return I gave him a pack of agarbhattis I picked up from Foodworld back home. Thats all I had that I could give.

So finally I was on the bus to Hangzhou, and all through the journey I Slept.