Impressions of China
My first impressions of China as I left Hangzhou airport was bright light through heavy rain. It was .8am and I left snowy Manchester the previous day at 9am; a long flight, the longest I’ve ever done. Slumped in a bus with other Study China students we drove into Hangzhou city towards Yuquan Campus on Zhejiang University, our home for the next three weeks.
We drove along a large straight busy motorway, past a flat landscape of endless straight fields and canals, past quirky three storey apartment blocks and past some of the largest and, frankly, most depressing apartment blocks I have ever seen. My wide angled lens couldn’t cope and neither could I. Plain, ugly, brutal, like an Ancoats warehouse on steroids.
And then I saw the bicycles, the scooters, the umbrellas, the rain coats, hundreds of them at every junction, in bright friendly, human colours: purple, blue, yellow, green. And then I noticed the flowers in bloom, in large beds along the roadside, neatly trimmed hedges in contrasting shades of bronze, copper and gold and avenues of trees beginning to leaf.
After settling into our dorm rooms we met several local students who will be helping us during our stay. We walked around the campus, were shown a local supermarket, some banks, saw a huge statue of Chairman Mao on the campus and ended up at Wallmart and MacDonald’s. I’m not in Kansas anymore…
