Sightseeing in Hangzhou- Jiuxi with State Street Hangzhou Advisors (Dec 10, 2016)

We finished our State Street internships, giving our final presentations in front of the whole team of advisors! Ming and I were on the gamification team. We used our experiences on what makes certain video games fun to see if we can add some of these game elements (like points, rewards, characters, etc) to an online investment application to make it more appealing. Basically we got paid to play games; I'm not complaining!


Gamification crew

To celebrate, two of the State Street advisors including mine invited Ming, Anh, and me to this beautiful area called Jiuxi, which means to cross a river 9 times. It's a walking trail that takes about 2 hours from start to finish and follows along the side of a river. Apparently you can cross the river 9 times by small rock paths, although we didn't do it- the rocks were too narrow!




The scenery on the walking path is very pretty, and the river reflections were cool too!


There's a beautiful lake in the center of the area- it was really nice to see how pretty Hangzhou's trees are in the fall.


My friend Ming took this amazing picture of the lake.


The end of the trail led us to a village right near Longjing. As soon as we got there, an old lady approached our advisors and invited us all into her home for fresh pecans (really sweet and yummy) and Longjing tea! We got really lucky!


We finished hiking around noon, so we were hungry! Our advisors were very generous to treat us to lunch at this Hangzhou cuisine restaurant called Green Tea. It's really popular here (as popular as waipo jia "Grandma's house"), and we had to wait 40 minutes for a table.


The food was worth the wait! We tried some beef curry, delicious sautéed potatoes, eggplant, mapo tofu, and a really spicy local fish. Plus these yummy green tea pastry cookie-like things.

People are probably wondering if I'm sick of Chinese food by now. The truth is I'm actually not super tired of it! When I go out to eat with my Tufts group, we generally mix up our meals enough with other cuisines occasionally like Korean, Japanese, Pho, and even sometimes American food (Ken deji!!!! KFC). I probably eat more Chinese food with my classmates.

We actually also discovered a really good pizza place in a random alley near campus. The pizza's made by a Chinese guy, but it's even considered good by my Italian classmate who I saw there one time!