44 Hours in Hangzhou

Recently I flew out of LAX and made a crazy 44 hour business trip to Hangzhou, China. It took me almost the same total time to travel there and back. As I said before, I like my day job.

But I fell in love with Hangzhou within hours of arriving. The city is about 2 hours south-west by train from Shanghai. It is a fairly large city by Western standards but considered a B city in China. From what I could observe in the short time I spent there, it looked fairly A+ to me.

The first thing you notice as you drive into the city from the airport is the crazy amount of construction going on everywhere. There are rows and rows upon newly constructed empty apartment towers for miles along the freeway from the airport into the city center. Many of them are vacant. The architecture is very starkly modern, almost Soviet. Though the facilities inside, I was told, surpassed even average Western expectations.

The city itself is a wonderful experience of wide clean streets with semi-disorderly traffic. The disorder mainly is due to the millions of two-wheeler scooters, mopeds and plain old bicycles. All the powered two-wheelers were electric. Motorcycles were rare, almost non-existent. Also, another unique feature of every main road was a parallel lane, separated by a median, for these two-wheelers and buses. The parallel lane is also used as a turning lane when you want to turn right. Turning left at an intersection is mainly an exercise of dodging oncoming traffic that does not stop even when only your left turn green light is on.

Hangzhou has several beautiful hills that are lush green with vegetation. The city is extremely tree friendly and every median, lane and yard has plants and trees that are lovingly maintained. This gave the city a very Pune-like feel right at the get go. I felt I was back in my hometown in India. The pace of the city too matched the Pune of my youth. It was not as fast and furious as Beijing or Mumbai.