Hangzhou

Stayed on the straight and narrow for my morning run today. What I did discover by chance, however, was some very familiar ground: The Shangri-La Hotel, where we first met Leah 11 years and 9 months ago to the day. We all went back on our first stop this morning to take pictures by the sign out front and in the lobby, where we met almost daily with the other families in our group in 1996. It sure brought back many great memories; we also discovered that Leah no longer fits in the papoose carrier that was her home for those two-and-a-half weeks. Memory Lane also included a boat ride on West Lake. (That’s our guide with us, Fu Jie, or “Ben.”) It really is almost as beautiful as one tour company’s description of it: “Dotted with temples and pagodas, the lake glistens against a curl of green hills.” Perhaps the “glistens” is a bit much, but you get the picture.

We also visited a Buddhist temple and the surrounding grounds, a place we had also seen in ’96. The Linying Temple, which dates from 326 B.C., once housed 3,000 monks in 300 buildings. Today, in addition to being a tourist attraction, it is still home to about 100 monks.

The population of Hangzhou and the surrounding area is almost 9 million, but most of our memory of it had centered on this beautiful area near the lake. Today didn’t do anything to change that.