Historic Hangzhou Shopping Street

Excited for a different kind of day. I'm going shop for a present for Moira. Going to hit an older part of town for lunch/shopping/dinner. I think mostly going to wing it. In a taxi now headed to go get a haircut first. Not sure why, but the older I get the shorter I seem to cut my hair. I guess I just don't want to have to deal with it. I've contemplated just shaving it all off and going with the chrome-dome look. Less gray showing that way?

Looking forward to seeing how much less restriction there is today. Since I've arrived in China there has been contact tracing everywhere. In order to enter just about any building you had to scan a personalized health code. Friends have told me that the QR codes are gone at the mall and all the doors are just wide open. We used to have to enter in only a few specific doors and ever other door that led directly into a shop was chained closed.

An odd thing that I've noticed. The majority of people are wearing masks still in public. At first I thought it was paranoia created by propaganda, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm told that before the pandemic people would wear masks all the time. I've seen seen Asian people doing this in Washington before. There's just a lot more of them here.

I had lunch near West Lake and strolled around the lake a bit.

Lunch was great. Pineapple rice, Chinese broccoli, fried chicken, cucumber with jelly fish, durin cheese, and paw paw. Yeah, jelly fish. A new first for me. It was sort of crunchy. Not bad. The chicken had large chunks of roasted garlic and ginger in it. Those were awesome. The paw paw is a vegetable (orange colored) with a sweet white cheese on it. Longjing green tea to drink and I am STUFFED.

This historic portion of Hangzhou is filled with shops. It gav me a chance to walk off lunch. Take a look...

Mission accomplished. Gifts purchased. No Pnut, I'm not going to ruin your surprises here. The area is composed of two long streets with several smaller ones of to the sides like alleys. I liked the cool looking stuff in the copper shop pictured above. Im told this neighborhood is at least 1000 years old from the Song Dynasty. Some of the buildings here are well over 100 years old now. Lots of gift shops that specialize in items specific to Hangzhou.

I had one shop where they asked me to wear a mask, but otherwise no code scanning or contact tracing to speak of.