Wanted to update this all week, but I've been really lazy. Last weekend after the rugby match the good times just continued. Found a pretty cool bar that night, hung out there for the night and met a bunch of cool chinese people. Next day went to Wuzhen. To me, the city is basically just a tourist trap. It's something like a cross between a renaissance fair and museum. It actually is something of an ancient city, and there are lots of canals and houses of important people in Chinese history. But there is also stuff like this demonstration:

Which overall was much cooler than the town or sites themselves. I actually liked the ride to Wuzhen much better than the city itself. I just watched the countryside go by and took a lot of pictures from the bus of people walking around and the scenery. I feel like some of the best pictures I've taken have been from buses in the last few months. Here are a couple good ones...




I wish I could just upload all my pictures, but it's such a pain to go to the internet cafe with my laptop and explain what I want to do. I tried to do it again a couple weeks ago, but the internet cafe guy said I wasn't allowed and if I wanted to i would have to talk to his boss (who I talked to the last time i did it and he let me) and the boss wouldn't be back for like 5 hours. It was more annoying because i had already paid for time and he refused to give my money back. Anyway, I'll try to do it eventually.

Other cool stuff happened last weekend, but nothing quite as interesting as what happened this friday night. It was one of the strangest things i've ever seen. We (about 5 of us) were leaving this bar at a pretty happy stage in the night and start walking down the street just wandering around trying to find another decent bar, then out of nowhere we see this line of people start hopping out of a barbershop. Yes, I said hopping...also, remember this was at about 11:30pm on a friday night. There were guys and girls, but mostly guys. They were all barbers, I could tell because all the male barbers here have dyed long hair (I think there is some kind of barber gang here where the initiation includes dying your hair and other vile obscenities). Walk by any barbershop in Hangzhou, and there are guaranteed to be at least 5 or 6 guys with long dyed hair chilling, watching cheesy chinese TV, and probably talking about what new colors they can dye their hair. Back to the story, so we're walking down the street and see this seemingly endless line of barbers jumping down the block. We can't stop laughing...we have no idea what is going on...my one friend decides to jump along with them and hops down the street with them -- to their inifinite delight. Then they get to the end of the block, turn around and all start hopping back. It was like a huge game of leap frog, but without the leaping over each other. They hop back to the barber shop that they came from, we were about to ask what the hell was going on, and some guy just shuts the door in our face. Two days later it's still bothering me...what the hell were they doing? My only guess is that it was some kind of barber initiation ritual. We all figured they went back inside to have a big dyed-hair initiation orgy. Nothing the rest of the night lived up to that encounter....