Hangzhou

Took the bullet train from shanghai which peaked at 350kmph, took an hour and cost 8 quid.
hangzhou is a city that makes birmingham feel like burton though one chinese girl i was talking too described it as cozy.big lake in the south west of the "downtown" area. with various temples scattered about. i stayed in a hostel that was in a newlybuilt area that imitated the style of old buildings, it looked nice but it was kinda like disney land.lots of little stalls and shops selling chinese souvaneers (chopsticks/tea/fans/traditional clothes etc).
behind this newly built street was a real old street with many traditional medicen shops. they looked like temples from the outside and had big doors and long corridoors to get into the main sales area. This looked like it could be a touristy type thing, but it was very seroius. the staff were all in white coats and had photo ID tags. they had traditional interiors, but in some of the shops things (such as cabbinets) were electronicly locked with key cards. During the day there were ques of people holding tickets and waiting for consultations.It was realy a doctors clinik. In the back you colud see other staff getting the prescriptions and then collecting the ingredients and putting them into differentcontainers then baging and labeling them. There was another area where you could buy items without perscrption. some of the prices were about one pound for a bit of rootwhile others were up to what i think was about 500 pounds for a pice of dried fungus.
There was a nice park in the area with some smaller temples, I saw it on the first evening and came back the next morning to take some photos of an empty area of concrete infront of a temple.It was full of OAP's doing a workout to some Happy hardcore. It wasnt quite the atmosphere i was expecting.