Sightseeing in Hangzhou- Da Yunhe (Dec 4, 2016)

Last weekend and this weekend I visited Hangzhou's Da Yunhe (Grand Canal). It's a really pretty area with a large canal in the middle and lots of free museums in the surrounding area. I went first last weekend because my class had a field trip together, and then this weekend I showed my Tufts friends because none of them had had a chance to come the first time.


Here's the entrance walkway. It's already lined with long strings of red signs saying "Merry Christmas!" I thought it was weird/funny.

First, we checked out the fan museum, which had lots of traditional Chinese fans like this ancient one, used to fan kings as early as the Han dynasty.



Beautiful embroidered fan


This one tricked me because it appeared to be a plain white fan, but look closely and there are tiny tiny Chinese characters that my eyes couldn't even read clearly.


Can you see them? :O


Next, we went to a knife/scissor museum. Sorry for the bad pic quality here- took some pics of photos that were on my computer.

These swords were from the Bronze age during the Han dynasty.


A more modern Tang Dynasty steel sword


I've never seen a museum display a whole collection of just scissors before, but Hangzhou's actually famous for them!


We also checked out the umbrella museum with this cool entranceway.





Lastly, we went to the handicraft museum that has a few cool demos you can try, like paper cutting, chopstick engraving, umbrella making, even making fabric cakes. We engraved our own chopsticks as souvenirs!


Next to the fabric cake-making place, I saw a little table with all of these bubbles with presidents in them and thought they were funny- they must've been made of fabric too. You can spot Obama, Putin, and many others!


After, we took a walk on the bridge in the center and got this really nice view of the canal. :)


An old man flying his bat kite over the canal around 4 pm


And here's my class lunch from last week at this fancy Hangzhou restaurant right next to the museum area entrance. Really delicious food and not too expensive! We got sweet and sour pork, eggplant, cauliflower, a mushroom/pork dish, and some kind of Chinese root vegetable.